The modality ladder grades three results: triadic structure as theorem, a lit (self-knowing) ground as inference to best explanation, and personhood as free encounter. This paper closes the gap at the second rung by elimination rather than inference. Five independently earned steps: the Ground-Level Intent Trilemma (borrowed directedness requires regress, random directedness was already eliminated, only self-grounding survives); self-directed activity must track its target; subject–object identity at the ground removes the conditions for misrepresentation; the subject–object gap is shown to be the sole structural feature distinguishing accurate directedness from knowledge, with the candidate space closed under gap-dependence by the Zero Test; and the Distinguishability Lemma applied to Presence itself forces self-constituting Presence to be self-presenting, since Φ is a mapping with intrinsic source→terminus structure. Zombie and normativity objections are addressed directly. The epistemic/volitional freedom distinction shows relational freedom survives the proof, leaving the third rung intact.
A claim can be argued well and still be false. Standard verification across the disciplines certifies claims by the quality of a single line of support: a formal proof, a measured correlation, a replicated experiment, an expert consensus. Each of these is one axis of warrant, and each can be strong while the claim is wrong, because a single strong axis cannot detect that it is the only axis, nor that it secretly shares a source with the others. This paper presents a verification method, Trisduction, that certifies a claim by the geometry of its warrant rather than by the strength of any one line of it. A proposition is decomposed onto three structurally independent axes, a formal-structural axis, an empirical-material axis, and an epistemic-registrational axis, and the warrant is certified only when the three stand at mutual right angles and span a genuine three-dimensional volume. The test is closed-form and executable: three warrant vectors are composed through a quaternion product whose scalar part squares to a Gram determinant, and the determinant reads the volume the three axes enclose. A volume near its maximum is a seal. A collapsed volume is a structural break with a named cause. An ill-conditioned volume is an honest under-determination. A second register extends the method to formal and mathematical propositions, separating the part of a problem that is decidable and sealed from the part whose truth is genuinely open, and refusing to read a geometric lock as a proof. The method carries one discipline throughout: social consensus carries zero evidential weight, every verdict states its warrant grade, and the instrument audits itself with no exemption. We demonstrate the method on 360 propositions spanning logic, mathematics, physics, quantum foundations, cosmology, the mind, psychology, the social sciences, geopolitics, and metaphysics, from elementary facts that seal cleanly to celebrated open problems where the honest verdict is that the question remains open and the method says exactly why. 360 Audits.
Range arguments are a type of zero-knowledge proofs that aim to prove that a prover's committed value falls within a specified range for a verifier. Previously, most range arguments were constructed based on the discrete logarithm (DLOG) assumption, and hence, exponentiation operation is required for proof generation and verification. In addition, it is generally known that splitting a zero-knowledge proof protocol into a preprocessing phase and an online phase makes computation after fixing the input efficient. Still, such protocol has yet to be known for range arguments. This paper proposes an efficient range arguments protocol with a preprocessing phase. Our proposal takes a new approach by using arithmetic circuits to express the constraints that the prover must prove. The prover (resp. verifier) can generate (resp. verify) a part of proof based on multiplication and addition operations instead of exponentiation operations. Our range argument is a generic construction that does not rely on any particular mathematical assumptions, which enables us to construct a post-quantum range argument. The implementation evaluation shows that the total computation time for the prover and verifier in the online phase is efficient compared to Bulletproofs, one of the state-of-the-art range proofs. Especially, the prover computation is efficient.
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is a strong governance method from an epistemic standpoint compared to alternatives such as various forms of ``transfer delegation" in which voters explicitly transfer some or all of their voting rights to others. We make a stronger case for multi-step transfer delegation than is present in previous work but also demonstrate that transfer delegation has inherent epistemic weaknesses. We show that enhanced direct participation, voters exercising their own voting rights, can have a variety of epistemic impacts, some very negative. We identify governance conditions under which additional direct participation is guaranteed to do no epistemic harm and is likely to increase the probability of making correct decisions. In light of the epistemic challenges of voting-based decentralized governance, we consider the possible supplementary use of prediction markets, auctions, and AI agents to improve outcomes. All these results are significant because epistemic performance matters if entities such as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) wish to compete with organizations that are more centralized.
Michael Della Rocca's project in his bold and iconoclastic book1 is to reject all distinction and multiplicity: there is only being. He calls this view strict monism.2 And, as the title of his book indicates, he sees his project as Parmenidean. There are accordingly references to Parmenides throughout the book, as well as a more focused discussion of Parmenides' views in Chapter 1. This is in line with something on which Della Rocca insists in Chapter 7, in keeping with such monism, namely that we should reject any distinction between doing philosophy and doing its history. I share Della Rocca's mistrust of that distinction. But I do not share it for the same reasons nor to the same extent. There seems to me a clear sense in which his project is more fundamentally philosophical than historical. Partly I have in mind the fact that his primary aim is simply to defend strict monism. And I think that the philosophical challenges that he thereby presents us with are more significant than any lessons that he has to teach us about where any given philosopher stands in relation to the view.3 My own focus in what follows will therefore likewise be on the issues themselves, though I too will engage with the work of other philosophers to the extent that I think it is relevant to do so. A preliminary before I proceed. Even the two short paragraphs that I have written so far contain material that is question-begging in this context. An obvious case in point is the very reference to ‘other philosophers’. That is illegitimate in strict monist terms. So too, come to that, are the references to ‘Chapter 1’ and ‘Chapter 7’. My excuse for begging questions in this way is something to which Della Rocca's book itself bears ample witness: anyone who wants to engage seriously with his views has no alternative. One of the issues that we shall need to confront is what this means as far as Della Rocca's own text is concerned. But there is no equivalent issue as far as my text is concerned. True, I would prefer not to beg questions. But, since I am not a strict monist, I feel no other compunction about writing in the way that I have; and I am reassured that I am at least not begging questions against myself. Della Rocca's starting point is the Principle of Sufficient Reason, or the PSR to use his own abbreviation. This is ‘the principle according to which each fact or each thing has an explanation’ (p. xiv). That this is his starting point straightway illustrates what I said in the previous section. For Della Rocca takes the PSR to serve as a basic principle for Parmenides too. As it happens, here already I have exegetical qualms: passages which, on Della Rocca's interpretation, show Parmenides to be rejecting distinctions that, if real, would involve things that could not be explained seem to me to show Parmenides to be rejecting distinctions that, if real, would involve things that could not so much as be.4 But I will not dwell on that. My focus, as I have already indicated, is on the issues themselves. Della Rocca has much to say about the kind of philosophical work that the PSR can do. But the principal work that he wants it to do is to yield strict monism. This is clearest in Chapters 2 to 6 of the book, which he describes as ‘[i]n many ways… [its] heart’ (p. xv). It is Bradley, rather than Parmenides, who plays the rôle of chief mentor in these chapters: Della Rocca uses the PSR to argue, in a broadly Bradleyan way,5 for the unreality of all relations, and thereby for the unreality of all distinctions. The argument assumes different forms in different contexts, but there is a core argument to the effect that any relation must be grounded in its relata, and thereby in the relation of grounding between itself and its relata, and thereby in the relation of grounding between the relation of grounding and itself and its relata, and so on ad infinitum, in a way that the PSR precludes. Objections to the project fall under three main heads. First, there are objections to the PSR. Second, there are objections to the contention that the PSR yields strict monism. Third, there are objections to strict monism. I shall devote a subsection to each, focusing in the third case on to strict it is to a kind of which will me to what we should the PSR on it is The that I in the previous much it not of The the the more to the PSR This is significant Della Rocca's are very in Chapter which is on Della Rocca that there is between the for an of what is and a to that we have kind of of (p. The is that a of what something is must itself we have of that and in that on of that will involve a or an or a it be said to be This seems to me to of have a kind of of But we have an of what a is a a point of which is a given This not of but it There are for the that the PSR is if it is in such a way that of this is to as an There be things of this that should not be to as say what is at is what of given But that is not to the Della Rocca's of the PSR to involve a of if it is to do the work that he wants it to do. it is that, Della Rocca describes the that he is us on as to (p. it throughout a much than that. It is not only of philosophy that a to distinction and So do of the PSR is to all of that if the PSR is to any of that it not do so on it that it be to is what it will do if it on it that are so that its to is more of a to reject than to reject the fact that the in a can be to reject a is itself a to reject the PSR in that A more of the PSR And the well to the all But all the more to reject can be to reject the to which we shall in be Della Rocca has an to the of we should the in the and that he which is the very point that I have namely that a more of the PSR This in Chapter where Della Rocca that any of the PSR yields his fact he that any of the PSR already yields strict monism. My about this argument will in the But, as the fact that his argument in Chapter is an argument for that of the PSR is a to reject Della Rocca will of he will that we say what is with his he in a my argument or sense me that where my argument but should what and I (p. in But it is not a of what anyone True, we do need to say what is with his But before we are in a to do that, we can the basic principle that no argument any given to any given is in itself an argument for that as to an argument against to which of the two it is be a very But there is no more for Della Rocca to way it that we his than there is for us to his the other way it that he his that the material in Chapter is all that Della Rocca has to in of his of the PSR all my references to ‘the will be to this Chapter where his focus is on he his to the of a to (p. a very is the PSR. Della Rocca not be This seems to me to be a of any (p. a that all and only things that are and are as a way of his use of There is a in which the has this for a the to his use of But in the relevant that is in the sense that is relevant to the PSR and that the of his he has the all and only things that are and are it be said to be its own But that would with Della Rocca's against of this kind seem something of a and But us not much of what in to terms. I have the means to in this is not this no can be its own its own on which it is and to this there is no It is It is not but a of the my is but and it not I will not to the of this on that a a of or a of or in a is it for a But this can be in the same way as the point about it is not the for a in the relevant so far as it means something as it not involve any for is it not involve that there is any such The fact that it the with the use to which Della Rocca under that at any not to to a for no a to what of for has no for to the what of it is to if we to the of is to what of can be in the same The fact that what of it is to need in the relevant as a for to the so far as to the means to something as any that doing so be it have no on the of is is not to that it can be the that is is The with the use to which Della Rocca under that Della Rocca his to about reasons in terms. He takes it that, there can be reasons for and against any given these reasons are in which case is at and or has to where the of reasons (p. This is all of his to that are reasons but But this is to us about the of reasons that are that is to say reasons that are nor in or the anyone who is the least to the that a is a to the extent that it is in an is to think that the reasons that a for or against any given are very us to Della Rocca's of this It very much an to on Della Rocca's But it It is the of Chapter of his book that is no to since is what the in Della Rocca's is the PSR. the is to an to it is to an to that the PSR And this a more is on Della Rocca's to the PSR This must of have an if the PSR is as must the of what there is to that is said in to And I do not there can be an that not to or involve or an that not the PSR in As for Della Rocca's of any to that us to Even if he to he to if his are his way of for is This is a significant of the of his And his to issues that are not to that an to would have though much Della Rocca is that there be any and it follows as a of that there be distinction or should there not distinction and is on Della Rocca's to I do not that there is to The issue is there is that is with Della Rocca's strict monism, there is not any such thing as a relation of any such thing as a of that can be in the of that I have point to in this of an different what has It a much discussion than I can but it is the PSR is of the things that has an is the of it in this more than any that the of the to the PSR to But to seriously the that the of has an is already to a of a with an as well as a It is to seriously the of something that will under a kind of and it more As far as own is there is no we should at in such terms. But as far as the of is there is or no that any that can be for the of will have any on the it say that is an it is a what has to think in such terms. There seem to are though I can think of and a of about And if Della Rocca this point that any is that of that will the that there is not only a at the of his but a there too. that in or more of its a relation on its One can this of as a of the a relation would be a as must be (p. It is a point this is an to Della Rocca's argument that the PSR yields strict monism, or it rather as a relation that be explained and therefore to the previous subsection as a to the PSR It is that if the is the there are of the of to say that is to its is not at all to that it can be any case all that at this is the on is which the given is that which the given is given as in is not that is said in a and same but that it is in a and same of all its The of is to these do not have the same and do not the of as the same There are not two as Parmenides' but a of which all its the the the is said in a and same sense of of which it is but that of which it is said it is said of I have already objections to strict monism. this subsection I shall namely that it is to a kind of all the objections that I am to Della Rocca's this seems to me the for to But it issues which I will on to in that is seems in something of the way in which, as the view that is an is that if there is no the that there is is say that is is to say that we between as are not at But what of these as is the at which if the is of it The to the is who that is an and who thereby the of the is not itself and who that is an and who thereby the of the is not itself Della Rocca not that distinction and are an He not that is an there is only being. This is as far as it As I have it Della Rocca not that distinction and are an what he have in a the of to distinction and he for on he to the and for what Della Rocca that he is at to on as he before the that has to and (p. and he will this in to that But it to what to to such given that too, on Della Rocca's are not so much as not have to be all that to think that if he is as he he must be with the same as or not have of that this its if Della Rocca is not as he but only as of a use of that what he would have as and I though it is to be that of the of Chapter which of a is to such a in his use of But his book very of the that we in Chapter For the the in it to philosophical and have the effect that and that seem to be to on of that. it is of Della Rocca's project that these should be as he confront the same in the he the of his book, that anyone who must what he has written as The is that, many many passages which, simply do not and Della Rocca be in a of many passages which, do As these and as has in any case obvious since the of this of the issues Della Rocca's book is what its are for its own That is the issue that I shall in the section. One is that we can any of the or in the book, since if we we would be what illegitimate in strict monist terms. There are two things of which this is each of which is as a for what Della Rocca is The is ad the of such a at least on a are which an that is to be as and which are to be as A is the that there is no to which with the that there is such a and a The thing of which the is is the thing that I the of the previous of what he has written in the as which, in the same he to a the of these the and the the are Even there are between that as though be what is in each case serve its what extent is it in each we are on what to be in though are not to the that are For if we say that, in the of the that there is no to we show that the of the is or if we say that to be have we said something in each is what it to and to be what it to be for the to It is not clear that the to all such questions will be the same in And this in means that there seems to be a significant issue about which of these if is the for what Della Rocca is the of much is what it to given Chapter of Della Rocca's book, which no main and given the rôle that this to in the book and that Della Rocca not us to any of the of the book as what it to that he is not in the book in and that, he and only what he he could in he would have written at But I think this would be For Chapter is not as as it It has a in the book, a and a the a that what he has in the is that must in to if only of that reference to As it Chapter is more an in an the in an But much more there seems to be on Della Rocca's with that there is only to of this that he that all is or that all is True, of these a of which It is not that this as far as the strict monist of what is is It is that, at the very of Chapter his strict monist view that all is Della Rocca that more to And we that we say as such and (p. It seems to that Della Rocca would be to a of what he in the and that all the is material that is to us this I am and if we the that he would be to the and all the the the issue of the or the is the for what he is doing is an issue about the of the It of that Della Rocca's view the issue in strict monist there be any distinction between the and the the material that is to the for Della Rocca describes the that he has on as use a And much on this in with Parmenides, he that as but and as so too Parmenides but and as Della Rocca has the in he in the or for that that it is the for what he is One thing that to show that he has the in mind is his to it is that this is not the for between the and the that it to There is a with its in the a of is itself a of this the of the that there is no that is to is that is a that is to is not anyone who a view of will on a as not And there is for about the or of at in these views is the same as that in the as of there is about these views are in the this that the between and is not in this context. it is not to the of the is the for what Della Rocca is is and what that it is not the for what he is the no in this something to which I shall in the namely the fact that Della not only all of his own he all of what has written or do not the things we and for things could be we the (p. But am I not Della Rocca that the book is a kind of or a kind of in on to to his am I not his the of the to not what he is but what we are is what I am I am to sense of this so far as there is any on Della Rocca's that it has to do with that to And if the book have to do with it is but a philosophical or a philosophical I am to say that I it and There is a in which philosophy that is or Della Rocca is at in to us to I do not he can the of of or I in the previous a between what Della Rocca is doing in this book and what is doing in the Della Rocca is all that has written or is a he which, the we are no to (p. This is in to who the of as are in which we have to is not a of the but the itself in its are not but the that there Della Rocca thereby a that is to not in the philosophical but in the or at the or in the we have the the that I in the previous the that I in mind I of the that Della Rocca's book is a kind of or and are no to in a relation to the we and to to (p. That be all very well where philosophical work is concerned. But Della Rocca think this he the or he his It seems to me that these questions are an for Della But is this simply if he is to us and what to what I have he is about what it takes to he has no to a book of the kind he has and the do not come do these questions of if Della Rocca is can there be any such thing as writing a book, or any such thing as Della And can anyone be to given strict that is but that it in any relation to any and that there be anyone with any to be But us these questions and us to extent we that Della Rocca is to us and that he is about what it takes to should we the previous I of a of passages Della Rocca's book in which he of things But us not be the of the that the thereby Even if what he is us can be as things should we is the to us of things is the to us of I am far that there is no to the what the to us of The the issue that I in with in is there is a that is with Della Rocca's strict monism. has to this all are But this not work to Della Rocca's only are all this is I have what I to be a of questions that Della But if strict is I have not any questions at all and there is no to is if strict is I have not any questions that are not and there is no to that is not and am in much as I have doing throughout this But if what I have doing throughout this is in in is something that I am to have it is what I do I say not I am to strict monism. It is what I do I am in the my It is what the a this me the so be it Della Rocca have any way of the of to us in to this as he must on a strict monist and as he throughout his own in his own I a he to the that is of to us things is of to he will be in a that against the PSR or he will us an of things is of to he that things is of to us it to serve he will have it that much to the of what he is mind that what to serve is not in fact that, but rather things in with the of and he the of things to as he at the of Chapter he will have a significant to the of what he is his own to do that, which have in this way as or no the he follows with he will as he at the of Chapter have to as all there and we shall where we with an issue about what the to us of in my own can my own of which can be in the or the and to I can is that it to serve And I can that that is to be an to such as Della Rocca's book, is thereby to be And, I am at I can it no what I say on a strict monist with the that this is only my of to as thereby in with Della Rocca about what is to the that what I am is and to on the that what I am And I am to on as I and the things that I and and to the philosophical views about these things to which I it can be that strict monism, its are with to a point and there the of we and with The previous subsection in an to the if Della Rocca is about what it takes to And the in that we shall not only but and sense of what to us will us and we shall where we But this be as Della Rocca is about what it takes to he is in about there be any The me that my such and but Della Rocca he is has us with a argument that my And if the where we the there there to with of this the of The where we to be a of and we there must us this to strict thereby a I think this of my can be The very point of that that there is on a strict monist view to us to serve are to be to with but not to the extent that we have to we have to the said in a can any I would any a This seem it is of the in which a his that his he it and the But the of the could against it in a where are no to in a relation to the but are to to And to extent the of a is likewise the same in such a is is with the in the is not that it is but that it not serve the my me something that serve my in if my on the of that my such and and if this is Della Rocca's I do at least I am in the to to what the me and to Della Rocca's if his argument is And I do not what there strict monism, to there is a very the of Della Rocca's book in which he to he in in do things in to a that (p. be this on Della Rocca's is more Even it as though it is an on his to a And this in means that it as it who to and the doing of should it Della Rocca if we do And in any case we can the we can Della Rocca to not what we are but what he is the previous with what follows if Della Rocca is about what it takes to I for reasons given in that he is not about that. I for reasons given in the previous that, if he this that things more to us than The of the point of are a more significant than the of But so could It would be with the to that could not be in which we in the way in the previous section. on this would be to a on the very of since only philosophy is of that we are in that It would have as a that the the For it would that as we something as it to we need to to the such a thing be a which is to questions it is an to what it is and to the what it is is not only but
This chapter provides a general overview of the Ethereum Consensus Layer (CL). It first describes the blockchain data structure and then introduces Ethereum&s;s consensus blockchain, called the Beacon Chain. We then turn to an explanation of Ethereum&s;s consensus mechanism, called Proof of Stake (PoS) or staking. It shows how staking involves validators who are incentivised to update the Beacon Chain honestly and disincentivised to engage in malicious behaviour. We conclude with advanced consensus topics such as Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) and blockchain forks.
Abstract This essay is dedicated to the memory of Katherine Hawley.1 Bitcoin was invented to serve as a digital currency that demands no trust in financial institutions, such as commercial and central banks. This paper discusses metaphysical aspects of bitcoin, in particular the view that bitcoin is socially constructed, non-concrete, and genuinely exists. If bitcoin is socially constructed, then one may worry that this reintroduces trust in the communities responsible for the social construction. Although we may have to rely on certain communities, I argue that social construction doesn’t imply a demand for trust because the relevant communities don’t take on any relevant commitments. Bitcoin is indeed trust-free.
Steven Pinker, being a public intellectual, may expect readers of his Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (RAT) to bring certain hopes and expectations to the task. They know Pinker as a distinguished expert on linguistics, communication, and cognitive science, a scholar with a deep knowledge of many theories from evolution to cognitive dissonance, a child of the Enlightenment and a prophet of progress. They will not be disappointed.Readers with sensitivity and memory may recall that Pinker sometimes oversells his message. How the Mind Works (Pinker, 1997), for example, was a wild and fun ride through the cognitive science of that time, but it did not reveal how the mind really works. As far as I can see, there are two main reasons for this shortcoming. One reason is the impossibility of omniscience (Felin, Koenderink, & Krueger, 2017). We will never know how the mind really works. What we can have are incrementally better models of it. In RAT, Pinker does better. He notes the impossibility of defining rationality in rational terms without begging the question. Yet he pragmatically forges ahead, and this is his genius.The other reason for why RAT goes a bit too far lies in its curated presentation of the relevant science. In How the Mind Works, Pinker's discussion of the social mind was based on the work of a handful of authors with an evolutionary point of view and homes in Santa Barbara. In RAT, Pinker casts a broader net but still anchors his story on a familiar cast of pioneers, namely Robyn Dawes, Paul Slovic, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky. Pinker knows that there is an ongoing debate over the nature of rationality and the proper role of normative models of thinking (Chater et al., 2018). Yet he sidesteps these difficult issues in order to tell a story of how the concept of rationality can be understood and how its practice can be improved. This story requires some omissions, and their shadow reflects the dark side of his genius. Given these caveats, my recommendation is to read the book but to do so with an attitude of properly curbed enthusiasm. That would be the rational approach.In his penultimate chapter Pinker asks, “What is wrong with people?,” and he knows that his readers have been waiting for him to raise this question. Pinker also knows that he can't answer it because he—as anyone would—has failed to define rationality without question-begging. So why do we care about a big question when all we can do is answer little ones, such as “Under what conditions do people neglect base rates?” Is it rational to think that many little answers will add up to a big one? As a connoisseur of Hume, Pinker knows that this question is a version of the induction problem. When a large number of little questions have been answered, another one may come along to frustrate us. Yet the effort to chip away at the big issue is not for nothing. Identifying limited questions and answering them is fun and profitable.Like Pinker, I have enjoyed the ride on the rationality train. My favorite example of a thought problem that puzzled many great Renaissance minds until Fermat and Pascal came along to solve it is “The problem of points” (Krueger, 2000). Suppose Steven and Joachim use a fair coin, bet on opposite sides, and agree to throw it until one of them has won six times. This person will get the $20 that Dominic has kindly provided. However, at the point where Steven has won five rounds and Joachim has won three rounds, Dominic is called to editorial duty and terminates the game. What is a fair distribution of the $20? As it turns out, 7/8 of the money should go to Steven because the only way I could win under the agreed-upon conditions would be to score another three wins in a row. Few people understand this intuitively, but Fermat's math leaves no doubt that the rational solution is also a moral one, and for once the tug of war between the sweet and the smart is relaxed.The problem of points, the solution of which was a crucial step toward the modern understanding of probability, is an example of significant, if limited, progress. Alas, the tug often asserts itself and leaves us in tragic dilemmas where rational individuals bring forth their own destruction. For example, Pinker is pessimistic about our prospects in the prisoner's dilemma and its derivates (e.g., commons dilemmas). For an optimist like Pinker, this is a surprising surrender. In fact, one ray of hope in the prisoner's dilemma is social projection, an inductive inference that was once considered irrational. Yet when people reasonably assume that other reasonable people will choose as they themselves do, mutual cooperation becomes more likely than the presumably rational catastrophe of mutual defection (Krueger, 2013). The dilemma of trust, not discussed by Pinker, also illustrates this point. Classic game theory holds that rational agents will not trust strangers on the assumption that there is no incentive to reward trust with trustworthiness. Yet a proscription of trust is self-defeating and thus irrational—as is a prescription of trust. The rational attitude is to gather available cues (e.g., self-other similarities) as well as moral considerations (e.g., the golden rule) and social projection. With that the leap of trust can be framed as a decision under calculated uncertainty (Evans, Ong, & Krueger, 2021).In Chapters 3 to 9, the main body of RAT, Pinker surveys engaging examples of problems posed and problems solved, thereby illustrating the many and diverse tools critical thinkers find in their boxes. Here are some of them in super-short shrift: Chapter 3 reviews the elements of logic, and this is just as well because “logic” is as close as one gets to the term “rationality” in the Greek language. The ur-term is “logos,” which we first find in Heraclitus as a reference to the hidden order of the universe. Aristotle used it to refer to how we think, or should think, about the world. Like Socrates and Plato before him, he figured that we need help. The chasm between thinking as it is and thinking as it should be had opened up and it stills yawns at us today. Pinker, like Dawes (1988) and many other pioneers, knows that the mastery of logic does not eliminate the question “What is wrong with people?” because villains can be perfectly logical in the pursuit of their villainy.Chapter 4 confronts human ignorance and its management with an introduction to probability and randomness. Probabilistic thinking is the poor human's retreat when high rationality in the form of “true knowledge” fails. Now that we know so little, how can we still be rational? The obvious task seems to be gathering more data, making coherent inferences, and detecting randomness wherever it may lurk. Yet there are ironic puzzles, such as deliberate ignorance, when people elect to hide information from themselves although they might have it for free. As it turns out, such self-blinding need not be irrational, in the tradition of King Oedipus's self-mutilation, but a rational response to an environment that has no compassion (Krueger et al., 2020).Chapter 5 is written in reverence of the Reverend Bayes, who sought an inductive proof of the existence of God and failed. For all its elegance, Bayes's theorem's ability to nudge us toward true beliefs depends on the quality of the assumptions that go into it, that is, the priors. When we ask “What is wrong with people,” we may find that they overadjust or underadjust their beliefs in light of evidence, but the deep problem is that many people with contrasting priors are willing to diverge rather than converge with their beliefs after evidence. Pinker refers to Stanovich's (2021) book on “myside bias” (reviewed in this issue), but his faith in Bayes remains intact.Chapter 6 follows the bending arc of the utility function and its implications for rational choice. Pinker follows the tradition of marveling at the beauty of utility theory's axioms and noting that we'd be better off in our goal pursuit by observing them. At least we'd be protecting ourselves from being turned into money pumps by exploiters who are more rational and less scrupulous than we are (Grüning & Krueger, 2021). Kahneman and Tversky (1979) delivered what should have been the coup de grâce to the utility paradigm by showing how preference reversals emerge from the human ability to adapt to current circumstances and their differential treatment of gains and losses. However, organisms that don't adapt (even fungi habituate to mild toxins) or that reduce their loss aversion to match their love of gains in absolute terms might not live long enough to see the next equinox.Chapter 7 discusses the management of errors. Signal detection theory (SDT) was created to help radar operators decide whether a blip on the screen represented a Stuka formation or a flock of geese, a situation in which human sensibilities prefer to tolerate a few more false positives if that means fewer Stukas will be missed (Swets, Dawes, & Monahan, 2000). Beyond the radar screen lies a reality: The Stukas are either coming or they are not. Being able to tell the differencewith a large d' is a way of having knowledge and thus of being rational. The beta parameter, that is, the threshold one sets for sounding the “Stuka!” alarm, is of interest only when d' is low. It is here that the trade-off between the two types of errors must be adjudicated in light of preferences and values. Pinker then presents the Neyman–Pearson theory of statistical decision making as if it were a version of SDT, although it was its predecessor (Neyman & Pearson, 1933). A critical difference is that the size of a statistical effect is a random variable. It's rather like asking, “How many Stukas are there?” If there is only one, we may not care, but our theory says there are four (i.e., a formation). Any power analysis, which nowadays fashionably and ritualistically prefaces every Result section of a psychology article, is conditioned on a theorized (i.e., unobserved) effect size. Whereas SDT yields d' as a measure of discriminative sensitivity, the Neyman–Pearson theory of statistical testing assumes a d', as well as a false positive and a false negative rate, and then yields a probability of the data under the assumption that d' = 0. Which theory is more rational?Chapter 8 surveys the essentials of game theory and presents rationality as John von Neumann saw it. This view leads to despair because when rational goals yield irrational outcomes, we have tragedy. When individually rational agents find themselves in noncooperative games such as the prisoner's dilemma or chicken, they can do no better than avoid exploitation (chicken) or face mutual destruction (prisoners). The failure of game theory highlights the failure of individualized notions of rationality when collective welfare is at stake. To frame rationality at the supraindividual level requires the surrender of methodological individualism, one of the sacred tenets of the Enlightenment. Both Pinker and I hesitate to accept the need for a methodological collectivism, but there may be no way around it.Chapter 9 seems mildly out of place because it covers familiar questions about correlation and causation. Pinker takes the conventional line of prioritizing causation. Chains of cause and effect are the cement of the universe, although we know from Hume that we cannot prove this. Correlation is a trickster because it enables sloppy causal reasoning. The rational person knows how to extract credible causal claims from correlation with the help of other cues such as precedence or mechanism. One may counter that, because causation cannot be observed but only inferred, a rational person can be imagined who is not interested in causal explanations but who has a good fix on the available correlations and is able to predict what will happen next. Data scientists and machine learners seem to be betting on this model of rationality (Krueger, 2020).Late in his distinguished career, German sociologist Helmut Schelsky (1975) diagnosed and bemoaned the rise of a priestly caste on campus. These self-anointed priests took it upon themselves, Schelsky argued, to tell the rest of society, and thus its productive classes, what was wrong with their perceptions and actions and what they should do to overcome their “false consciousness.” After the Enlightenment had broken the power of the seminary to control thinking, the power of the seminar took its place. Today, we see a similar situation in cognitive psychology. Reasoning errors are revealed—or rather designed—to bring forth in the audience the humbling Aha! experience of “How could we be so stupid!” The omniscient lecturer then offers a path toward salvation. “Think again,” they might say (Grant, 2021), or think that which is not on your mind (Kahneman, 2011), or learn to think like us, the scientists (Pinker, 2021). Much like Schelsky's estranged colleagues from the Frankfurt School, today's cognitive scientists of the Kahneman school treat their audience to a domination–submission ritual. We tell you what's wrong with you, they declare, and you will thank us (and pay us) for it. The false consciousness lies in the audience's cheerful acceptance of this game.Arguably, the greatest achievement of psychological science is the demystification of the workings of the visual system. Visual illusions are endlessly fascinating in their weirdness and instructive in what they teach us about this masterpiece of nature. Tversky and Kahneman's (1974) greatest rhetorical trick was to suggest that cognitive illusions are analogs of visual illusions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pinker wisely notes that to reveal the nuttiness of a belief is to challenge the believer to act on it, but he still is lulled by the Sirens’ song of the visual illusion metaphor. If the metaphor were true, there would be no irrationality. The so-called cognitive illusions would be the features of the system, not its bugs. This is a conclusion I do not wish to defend. Irrationality does exist, and it is all around us.Pinker comes closest to a solution, I think, when he early on in RAT tells how the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari reason about their environment with exquisite cognitive skill. Their abilities meet the demands of their ecology, to the detriment of the springbok. Most contemporary people live in a world in which their skills are not aligned with their ecology, and this is partly the fault of the academic priests who design wicked puzzles in their labs or on their Qualtrics platforms (Lejarraga & Hertwig, 2021). Perhaps it is time to chill about individualist rationality, take a more ecological perspective (Hertwig, Leuker, Pachur, Spiliopoulos, & Pleskac, 2021), and not forget to have a good laugh (Kazantzakis, 1952).
METAMODERNISM: THE FUTURE OF THEORYBy Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021 Pp. xiii +328. Hardcover, $63.80, Paper $26.68. Metamodernism launches a movement to restart the scholarly enterprise by calling for “a new model for producing humble knowledge that is capable of tracing the unfolding of de-essentialized master categories in their full complexity” (ix). What is at stake is none other than the future of human sciences. Storm's project to save the human sciences is ambitious and expansive. Rather than merely using reflexivity to explode fundamental concepts such as religion, science, and society, he goes further. Throughout the chapters, he maps out a few of the next steps in several new directions toward doing reflexive humanities: a process social ontology, hylosemiotics, and an alternative to the entrenched dualistic myth of realism vis-à-vis anti-realism. There are many reasons to praise Storm's work. It is rich, complex, and often witty. I chuckled along when he lays out time-honored “strategies for demolition” (65-77). Humor aside, Metamodernism carefully explains various forces at work in producing the sorry state of all human sciences in which scholars find themselves today. Chief among them is an enduring faith in the idea of “objective” scholarship1 and the ensuing deconstructive scholarship that calls everything into question, which, according to some critics, is corrosive and has ushered in the post-truth era. Other than the concrete steps to build new models, Storm's methodological solution to get out of this quandary is reflexivity,2 which I understand to be a classic Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka move—“to be skeptical about skepticism itself” (211). I could continue to sing many praises for Storm's courageous moves to incorporate Buddhist philosophical toolboxes into the Euroatlantic-centric field of critical theory. But, if we were to get serious about saving human sciences, I suggest that, at the bare minimum, we ought to start asking what philosophers in the Global South, past and present, have to say on these crucial issues about human knowledge that matter to everyone on this lonely planet. Or, extending Charles Hallisey's provocative question, I posit that reflexive humanities, instead of merely asking “what we can learn about others,” must sincerely ask “what can we learn from cultures in the Global South?”3 Let me share two Yogācāra insights that shed crucial light on the unexamined ontological presumptions underpinning all “objective” research. As a living tradition, Yogācāra traces its origin to the founders of 4th and 5th century India, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, and posits that everything perceptible is mere conscious processes. For those who instinctively see Yogācāra as absurd, I beg you to give me two more minutes. At the risk of stating the obvious, all forms of knowledge (past, present, and foreseeable future) are mediated and produced by human consciousness, collectively or individually. Therefore, all forms of knowledge, especially those produced by disciplinary studies such as math, physics, biology, literary critique, religion, critical theory, and so on, are human knowledge and can never be mind-independent. At the very least, those committed to the epistemological framework that objectivity involves cognizing or perceiving self-evident or mind-independent “objects” or “principles” should bear the burden of proof.4 They must provide convincing evidence to refute the following Yogācāra counterargument: the conception of “an objective world outside human consciousness” is merely a convenient fiction conjured up by human consciousness for the interests of specific persons or groups.5 Scholars familiar with the Buddhist philosophy of no-self would immediately recognize the parallel philosophical move to dismantle a constellation of entrenched, seemingly natural concepts such as “self,” “ego,” “subjectivity,” or “inner psyche” as convenient fictions.6 Seeing through the colonial myth of objectivity is crucial not only for the future of the human sciences but also for the survival of humanity. Generations of scholars have incisively pointed out how the enterprise of “objective” knowledge production had instigated, validated, or at least been implicated in the colonial obliteration of the native populations of South America, North America, and Australia, the Atlantic Slave trade that halved the African population, and the defilement of the Chinese population who were drugged into submission by the violent Opium Wars and the ensuing destructive “free trade” of opium. From Frantz Fanon's 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Edward Said's 1979 Orientalism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to the ongoing discussions in feminist theory, critical race theory, and critical caste theory, generations of scholars have exposed the untenability of “objective” research and repeatedly offered viable alternatives. And yet, the myth of “objective” human knowledge keeps reproducing and proliferating. Most recently, Marco Armiero lamented that “so-called objective research is so entrenched in mainstream discourse that we cannot even detect how biased it is” (Armiero 2022). Why? I do not know for sure. But I know that keeping the scholarly conversations enclosed within the Global North and for the Global North will not help. It is time to open up, let the subaltern speak, and listen with care. When I looked into a similar discussion about human knowledge production in early twentieth-century China, when the misguided debate about the dualism between religion and science was imported, I found a more informative meta-question: what sort of social ontology could both accommodate the scientific enterprise and enable a better understanding of different collectivities and social dynamics (Zu 2021). Of course, the potential answers to this meta question are many. Two decades ago, the feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger pointed out one, that is, distinguishing the descriptive (finding out the objective truths) versus the ameliorative (finding out what we value and how to enact those human values) projects (Haslanger 2005). Storm's answer is social process philosophy, a new philosophy that drew crucially from the Buddhist Madhyamaka concept of niḥsvabhāva, lack of self-nature or interdependence (94). Similarly, a century ago, in 1920s China, the modern Yogācārins pointed out another path: having rejected the problematic ontological dualism of the object and the subject and the false account of knowledge as mind-independent, impartial representations of an “objective” reality, they argued that scientific findings could be established and systematically distinguished from pseudo-scientific claims if we follow the Yogācāra epistemology first articulated by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. The core premise of their non-dualist épistémè is that knowledge is always mediated and produced by a conditioned human mind that exists in a state of interdependence with the world. Complementing the incisive post-colonial analysis of how “objectivity” has been wielded as a weapon for colonial domination,7 the 1920s Chinese Yogācāra critique pierced right into the heart of the philosophical untenability of the colonial épistémè. More crucially, this modern interpretation of Yogācāra epistemology showcases the second Yogācāra insight that could help us further the project of metamodernism: after abandoning the imported, misguided conception of objectivity as the gold standard of scholarship, the future is not a chaotic, post-truth era of “anything goes.” Instead, these modern Yogācārins reformulated Vasubandhu's critiques of realism in Twenty Verses (Viṃśikākārikā). They further argued that what we conceived as objective reality and valid scientific findings could be systematically distinguished from false claims by three epistemic standards of intersubjective corroboration,8 coherence, and causal efficacy (or karmic efficacy), in short—the three C's. Significantly, more than recycling the premodern methods such as the Prāsaṅgika move of being skeptical of skepticism, these modern Yogācārins also drew from Asaṅga's instructions on how to engage in intersubjective conversation and invented something akin to the modern scientific practice of organized skepticism (Asaṅga 2000, 251-2). Borrowing Naomi Oreskes's eloquent explanation, scientists practice organized skepticism because (1) they do it collectively and (2) they do it from the position of distrust, that is, the burden of proof is on the person with a new claim.9 This way, the modern Yogācāra epistemology calls on all scholars to practice organized skepticism grounded in the three C's. What is radically different in the Yogācāra form of organized skepticism is the conviction that scholarly conversation and knowledge production must begin with an honest acknowledgment of two basic facts about human experience: (1) its intersubjective and interdependent nature and (2) its limitedness and conditionality. With this honest starting point in sight, the goal of knowledge production is not merely about knowing a world out there but also crucially about enriching humanity by recognizing and learning from genuine human and inter-species differences. Indeed, this century-old Chinese Yogācāra project finds many resonances in Storm's “revolutionary happiness” (265). To enact this revolutionary happiness, Storm draws from a well-known Confucian adage, “I focus on those who are good and seek to emulate them, and focus on those who are bad in order to be reminded of what needs to be changed in myself” (263). To gain a fuller picture of this Confucian way of being reflexive and of cultivating empathy, readers can benefit from Paul Goldin's insight, that is, paying attention to the core concept of shu in the Confucian golden rule of “doing unto others as you would have others do unto you if you had the same social role as they” (2020, 38). As a way of life, reflexivity requires one to adopt a developmental concept of personhood, be it underpinned by the Buddhist no-self or Confucian ideals of human becoming. Under this developmental paradigm of being human, reflexivity necessitates clear comprehension of both one's own social role (or positionality) and that of others. We emulate others' good behaviors or avoid others' bad behaviors when we are positioned similarly in society as they. This rational assessment of each other's social positionalities enables one to cultivate a radical empathy that allows us to be morally alive and to make proper decisions under different circumstances.10 When applied to the scholarly enterprise, the rule of thumb is that we ought to study others in the same way as we would like to be studied. Without this radical empathy, we risk producing the same kind of rubbish knowledge as exemplified in Umberto Eco's parodies, such as “Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society” (1993, 69-94).11 I doubt any scholar today will disagree with me on this in principle. That said, I want to alert readers to a gaping double standard in mainstream scholarly practice. On the one hand, in studying canonical Western thinkers or texts such as Locke's or Hume's empiricism, or Balzac's literature, there's an entrenched reluctance to contextualize ideas, philosophies, or literary productions within the larger socio-political milieu (e.g., the thinkers' ideological justifications for monarchism, slavery, or racial theory) and an equally entrenched investment in the “inherent” merit of these theories or texts (Said 2003, 13).12 This sort of collective hermeneutics of trust regarding Western traditions and ideas is termed by Charles Mills as “epistemology of ignorance” (1997, 93). On the other hand, when studying thinkers or texts in the Global South, using Sinology as an example, the prevailing practice is a hermeneutics of suspicion that rejects the idea that “a text was produced because the authors of the past were inherently interested in the ideas embodied therein,” but rather unwaveringly remains vigilant against ideologies or hidden agendas that are somehow “sedimented throughout tradition” because it must have advanced “the interest of the individual or an institution” (Xiang 2018, 26-7). Although Mills did not explicitly comment on Sinological practices, I think he would agree that hermeneutics of suspicion regarding non-Western traditions constitutes the other face of the mainstream epistemology of ignorance. However, what happens if we follow the instructions from the modern Yogācāra epistemology? In that case, it seems that the best practices in reflexive humanities should incorporate both hermeneutics of trust and hermeneutics of suspicion and equally apply them to both the objects of study and the studying subjects. This rational and empathetic reflexivity, as seen in both the Buddhist and Confucian cases, is crucial, especially when we know that facts are infinitely malleable according to perspectives imposed on them by interpreters. More than getting things right, reflexivity is vital for us to learn how to take back our human freedom to envision and enact other forms of becoming human and other ways of living together. If we could take back this basic human freedom, maybe human dwellers on this lonely planet could summon enough political will to motivate effective strategies to deal with the climate crisis and save ourselves from ourselves.13
Abstract Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). Given some standard assumptions about the values at stake, the case for convicting and punishing using statistical evidence seems solid. In trying to show where this argument goes wrong, I shall argue (against Lockeans, reliabilists, and others) that beliefs supported only by statistical evidence are epistemically defective and (against Enoch, Fisher, and Spectre) that these epistemic considerations should matter to the law. To solve the puzzle about the role of statistical evidence in the law, we need to revise some commonly held assumptions about epistemic value and defend the relevance of epistemology to this practical question.
HERE I present a challenge to prioritarianism, which is, in Derek Parfit's words, the view that ‘we have stronger reasons to benefit people the worse off these people are’.1 We have such reasons, according to this view, simply by virtue of the fact that a person's ‘utility has diminishing marginal moral importance’2 —i.e., that equal improvements in a person's well-being matter less, morally speaking, the better off she is in absolute terms. It follows, from this view, that one might have stronger reason to benefit someone who is less well off rather than someone who is better off, even when this benefit would amount to a lesser increase in utility than a benefit to the better off person.3 In discussions of prioritarianism, it is often left unspecified what constitutes a greater, lesser, or equal improvement in a person's utility. In his own defence of prioritarianism, for example, Parfit explicitly prescinds from ‘difficult questions … about what it would be for some benefits to be greater than others’ and ‘simply assume[s] that we can distinguish between the size of different possible benefits’.4 Parfit just stipulates numerical benefits of different magnitudes that comprise intervals along a whole number cardinal scale that is meant to represent the absolute levels of people's utility in linear fashion.5 We are supposed to assume that this scale provides an accurate representation of people's utility. But we are not offered an account of what constitutes the measure of the size of the units on this scale. I shall argue that prioritarianism cannot be assessed in such abstraction from an account of the measure of utility. Rather, the soundness of this view crucially depends on what counts as a greater, lesser, or equal increase in a person's utility. In particular, prioritarianism cannot accommodate a normatively compelling measure of utility that is captured by the axioms of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's expected utility theory. Nor can it accommodate a plausible and elegant generalization of this theory that has been offered in response to challenges to von Neumann and Morgenstern. This is, I think, a theoretically interesting and unexpected source of difficulty for prioritarianism, which I shall explore in the remainder of this article. In presenting this challenge, it will be useful for me to begin with a case that is closely modelled on one that Thomas Nagel presents in his essay ‘Equality’6 —and with which Derek Parfit opens his Lindley Lecture ‘Equality or Priority?’7 Imagine that you are the parent of thirteen-year-old twins. For the sake of interpersonal comparability, let us assume that they are identical twins with identical preferences. They differ, however, in the following crucial respect: one of them has recently been diagnosed with a condition that will soon give rise to a severe mobility-impairing disability, but the other has been given a clean bill of health. 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SCIENTIFICALLY based professionals face the dilemma described by James Oberg, National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineer and space journalist: “You must keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”1Startling advances, such as the role of Helicobacter pylori in the etiology of stomach ulcers,2remind us of the need to be receptive to unexpected discoveries that challenge our beliefs.As practitioners of a science-based profession, physicians have a responsibility to patients to (1) critically interpret their medical history, (2) critically read and evaluate the scientific literature, and (3) critically plan their therapy using evidenced-based medicine. How well do we meet this standard?Anesthesiologists are arguably the most experienced practitioners of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. For example, my general anesthetics typically start with a ventilatory arrest (usually by intent), followed by need for cardiovascular support. The 2005 American Heart Association guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation assess the evidence for “best practices” in resuscitation.3Class I recommendations describe interventions that unambiguously improve outcome and should always be provided. These include defibrillation, tracheal intubation, and (remarkably) taping the endotracheal tube. Class IIa recommendations, whose benefits almost always exceed risks, include many widely accepted interventions, such as administering oxygen, confirming carbon dioxide returning from the airway, the use of various airway maintenance devices, proper use of a defibrillator, magnesium for the treatment of torsade de pointes, fibrinolysis for suspected pulmonary embolus, and use of the impedance threshold device to improve recovery.In all probability, you have never heard of the impedance threshold device, also a class IIa recommendation, despite the fact improved outcome has been demonstrated in more than 50 animal and clinical trials of resuscitation. The device is a special valve that attaches to a facemask or advanced airway device (fig. 1). In the absence of a positive-pressure breath, it seals off the airway when the chest recoils during the decompression phase of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, thereby generating more negative pressure in the thorax to draw more blood into the great vessels and heart. This also decreases intracranial pressure. The device doubles cardiac output during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. According to a recent meta-analysis, the impedance threshold device nearly doubled short- and long-term survival after cardiac arrest, at a cost of approximately $99 per unit.The American Heart Association Guidelines characterize epinephrine and amiodarone as class IIb recommendations, meaning that benefit may exceed risk. Lidocaine and atropine are class III recommendations, indicating insufficient evidence. What does it mean that few anesthesiologists have ever used the impedance threshold device, which roughly doubles survival at nominal cost, and has stronger evidence for benefit than epinephrine, amiodarone, lidocaine, and atropine, mainstays of current practice? In my view, it means that we are not as scientifically based in our practice as we would like to believe. Instead, our clinical practice reflects traditions and beliefs instilled during training, which only gradually adapt to scientific progress.As practitioners of a science-based profession, we also have a responsibility to the society in which we live to function as role models for critical thinking. The public is surprisingly naive about the scientific method. How else can one explain the marketing of such unlikely marvels as running your car on water,†a heater that produces more energy than used,‡or curing cancer with magnets?§Consider the following urban legend: A businessman in New Orleans meets a prostitute in a bar. They go to her hotel room, where he blacks out. The next morning he awakens in a bathtub, with a note telling him to call 911. The dispatcher tells him to feel for a tube protruding from his lower back. He finds one, and is told his kidney has been stolen.Clinicians will readily dismiss this story because of the impossibility of performing a donor nephrectomy in a hotel room, and the sheer weirdness of awakening from surgery and anesthesia in a bathtub with a tube in your back. However, the claim has been so widely circulated that the National Kidney Foundation issued a formal repudiation.∥However, when this “innocent” urban myth circulated in South America, there was a 90% decrease in cadaveric kidney donations.4Considering that many individuals waiting for transplants die before receiving a transplant, this “harmless” urban legend may have resulted in significant morbidity and mortality. Ignorance has consequences!You have likely received e-mails promising fortunes in exchange for some nominal effort, such as helping transfer money from Nigeria or contacting an agency that has chosen your e-mail address in a previously unknown lottery. When the victim attempts to procure the money, he or she is instructed to pay increasingly large advance fees to facilitate the transaction. Such transparently bogus schemes net billions of dollars every year from gullible individuals.#Millions of gullible individuals firmly believe in alien abductions, crystal healing, channeling, psychic power, touch therapy, and implausible dietary wonders because they do not have the intellectual tools to evaluate fraudulent claims. More broadly, our political process, our allocation of national resources, our foreign policy, and our stewardship of the planet all suffer from an endemic resistance to think critically as a society. As physicians, we need to lead by example.If we are to be role models of critical thinking, we need to understand how to evaluate claims based on evidence. James Lett, Professor of Anthropology at Indian River Community College, proposed a taxonomy of six essential elements for reasoning from evidence: falsifiability, logic, comprehensiveness, honesty, replicability, and sufficiency (table 1).5Falsifiability refers to whether a claim can be disproved by evidence. If the truth of a claim is completely immune from all evidence against it, the claim cannot be evaluated scientifically. For example, some cultures believe that everything has a spirit, including the rocks, the trees, and even the wind. This belief does not yield any testable predictions. How can you disprove that the wind has a spirit? As these beliefs cannot be proved or disproved from evidence, they are simply beyond the realm of science.A lot of “new age” thinking suffers from lack of falsifiability. Can people really channel their thoughts through crystals? If this leads to testable predictions, then it can be prospectively evaluated. If not, the claim is scientifically meaningless. The same is true for many claims from practitioners of “alternative medicine.” How can one evaluate a treatment that promises to “improve your well-being”? If that cannot be defined, it cannot be tested.Infinite excuses are often used to protect pseudoscientific viewpoints from falsifiability. For example, creation “scientists” hold that God created the earth and its life forms based on literal reading of the Bible. The mountain of evidence for evolution through natural selection, drawn from epidemiology, evolutionary biology, comparative biology, geology, statistical modeling, paleontology, molecular biology, and genetics, including the sequencing of the genomes of many species, is entirely dismissed. Why are dinosaur bones buried in the earth? “God wanted it that way!” Not only is creation “science” devoid of falsifiable propositions, but infinite excuses preclude rational debate about the merits of creationism.Similarly, believers that the earth has been visited by extraterrestrials answer all criticism regarding the complete lack of evidence for extraterrestrial visitation on the basis that the evidence is suppressed by the government. It is all kept under lock and key in Area 51! This permits infinite excuses and prevents falsifiability of the claims. This is the essence of junk science.Logic involves valid methods of inference. Some methods are self-evident. If I say that all dogs have fleas, and Roxy is a dog, it follows that Roxy has fleas. However, if I say that all dogs have fleas, and Roxy has fleas, it does not follow that Roxy is a dog. Roxy could be the neighbor’s kid.Logic can be devilishly confusing. Consider the 1960s television game show Let’s Make a Deal hosted by Monty Hall. This show was based on a stage with three doors. Behind one of the doors was a valuable prize, frequently “Monty’s Cookie Jar” stuffed with money. Behind the other two doors were joke prizes, typically goats. The contestant was instructed to pick one of the doors. Let’s assume the contestant picks door 1.At this point in the show, Monty would typically open one of the two doors not chosen by the contestant, invariably revealing a goat to howls of inexplicable laughter from the audience. (Since Monty knew where the cookie jar was, did they think that Monty would reveal the cookie jar and spoil the game?) Let’s assume that Monty has opened door 3, revealing the goat. Ha ha! At this point the contestant is offered a choice: stay with door 1, the original selection, or switch to door 2. Nearly all contestants chose to stay with door 1.The logic could not be simpler: There are just three doors, and one question: stay or switch? It is remarkably nonobvious that the probability of winning Monty’s Cookie Jar is doubled by switching to door 2. The reason is that in opening door 3, Monty has told the contestant nothing about door 1. There was a one-third probability that this was the correct choice when the choice was made, and there is still a one-third probability after door 3 is opened. There was a two-thirds probability that Monty’s Cookie Jar was behind doors 2 or 3, and that is still the case. However, because there is zero chance that Monty’s Cookie Jar is behind door 3, there is a two-thirds probability that it is behind door 2. Therefore, the probability of winning Monty’s Cookie Jar is doubled by switching.**The same problem has confounded research in psychology for several decades. In studies of cognitive dissonance, a monkey is offered a choice between a red and a blue M&M. Let us assume that the monkey selects red. The monkey is then given a choice between a blue and a green M&M. The monkey is approximately twice as likely to pick green. Assuming that there was a 50:50 chance that the monkey would pick either color, the preference for green was assumed to represent “cognitive dissonance,” psychological angst over the selection of the previously rejected blue M&M. This has been the basis of decades of research in cognitive dissonance.However, there is not a 50:50 chance of the monkey picking a green M&M versus blue M&M. As pointed out by Keith Chen,6this is the Monty Hall problem. Assume that the monkey has a true preference among the three colors. Figure 2shows the six possible preferences. The monkey’s preference for the red M&M over the blue M&M rejects half of the possible preferences, shown as a line through three of the six possible preferences in figure 2. Among the remaining three possible rank orders, green is preferred over blue in two cases, and blue is preferred over green in one case. Therefore, the animal is twice as likely to pick the green M&M as to pick the blue M&M, not 50:50 as was assumed. The Monty Hall and monkey M&M choice problems are striking for the nonobviousness of the correct answer, which is particularly remarkable given the exceedingly simply structure: three doors or three M&Ms.Logic can be distorted by the ambiguity in our language. For example, many would agree that a ham sandwich was better than nothing. It is similarly evident that nothing is better than eternal happiness. If both statements are true, does it not logically follow that a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness?Logic also involves statistics. 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In two important recent books, John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley each argue that non-evidential factors, such as the cost of being wrong and salience of possible error, have a place in epistemological theorizing. This point is familiar from the work of epistemological contextualists, who emphasize non-evidential speaker factors: factors which, when present in a speaker's conversational context, affect the semantic content of her knowledge attributions. According to Hawthorne and Stanley, the appropriate focus is on the subject, rather than the speaker: when the relevant non-evidential factors are present in a subject they can affect whether the subject knows. This suggests a reorientation for epistemology, away from the standard “intellectualist” (Stanley's term) model, endorsed even by contextualists, according to which only evidential or more broadly truth-related factors (evidence, safety, sensitivity, reliability, etc.) bear on whether a subject knows. If Hawthorne and Stanley are right, then the contextualist program should give way to a program of anti-intellectualist invariantism, or to use a more common label, subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI).1 The books explore in insightful and original fashion a range of important issues in epistemology, all focused on the concept of knowledge: the lottery puzzle, skepticism, the knowledge rule of assertion, the relation of knowledge to objective chance, epistemic closure, etc. Here, we limit ourselves to the relative merits of SSI. Stanley claims that the only plausible argument for contextualism is based on intuitions about certain stakes-shifting cases (like Keith DeRose's bank cases and Stewart Cohen's airport case). (84) This is because he takes the contextualist about knowledge attributions to be positing a sort of context-sensitivity which departs significantly from the familiar sorts. He painstakingly backs up this claim in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 2, ‘know’ is shown not to be a gradable expression (it doesn't admit modifiers and has no associated comparative), and so the assumption that gradable expressions are context-sensitive is no evidence that ‘know’ is. Chapter 3 argues for two general points: first, our use of propositional anaphora (‘what I said’) and speech reports (‘I said that I knew’) doesn't follow the pattern displayed by familiar context-sensitive expressions (like modals, demonstratives, quantifiers, gradable expressions); second, we do not find the sorts of intra-discourse context-shifts that we find with the uncontroversial examples and which we would expect to find given the plausible assumption that context-sensitivity has its source in particular occurrences of elements in logical form.2 Stanley's conclusion is that if the intuitions in the stakes-shifting cases can be explained away adequately without resorting to contextualism, we would have little reason to accept contextualism.3 If Stanley is right about the dialectical situation, the ramifications for epistemology are significant. Contextualists have wanted to argue that, because these cases force us to acknowledge dramatic shifts in epistemic standards across contexts of use, we have good reason to think that even more dramatic shifts could be the source of the appeal of skeptical arguments. Without an independent reason to think that dramatic shifts occur, contextualists have no good answer to the charge that their response of skepticism is ad hoc, the sort of easy response available to solve almost any philosophical puzzle. With all this in mind, here are DeRose's original (1992) bank cases: Bank Case A (Low Stakes). My wife and I are driving home on a Friday afternoon. We plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit our paychecks. But as we drive past the bank, we notice that the lines inside are very long, as they often are on Friday afternoons. Although we generally like to deposit our paychecks as soon as possible, it is not especially important in this case that they be deposited right away, so I suggest that we drive straight home and deposit our paychecks on Saturday morning. My wife says, “Maybe the bank won't be open tomorrow. Lots of banks are closed on Saturdays.” I reply, “No, I know it'll be open. I was just there two weeks ago on Saturday. It's open until noon.” Bank Case B (High Stakes). My wife and I drive past the bank on a Friday afternoon, as in Case A, and notice the long lines. I again suggest that we deposit our paychecks on Saturday morning, explaining that I was at the bank on Saturday morning only two weeks ago and discovered that it was open until noon. But in this case, we have just written a very large and important check. If our paychecks are not deposited into our checking account before Monday morning, the important check we wrote will bounce, leaving us in a very bad situation. And, of course, the bank is not open on Sunday. My wife reminds me of these facts. She then says, “Banks do change their hours. Do you know the bank will be open tomorrow?” Remaining as confident as I was before that the bank will be open then, still, I reply, “Well, no. I'd better go in and make sure.” (913) How do these cases support contextualism?4 It seems (premise 1), you speak the truth in both cases. But (premise 2) you have the same evidence and generally the same truth-related factors regarding the proposition in question. Therefore, (conclusion) the sentence ‘I know that the bank will be open on Saturday’ must differ in semantic content in these two contexts of use, due to a difference in content associated with ‘know’: contextualism is true.5 Stanley grants both premises but denies the conclusion. The conclusion follows only on the assumption of intellectualism—only on the assumption that, if the content of ‘I know that the bank is open on Saturday’ is the same in the two cases, a difference in the sentence's truth-value across the cases requires a difference in the evidence for the bank is open on Saturday. But perhaps intellectualism is false: even if ‘I know that the bank will be open on Saturday’ has the same content across the cases, it could be true in one case but false in the other because the practical facts differ. SSI can handle the bank cases just as well as contextualism. DeRose's bank cases are cases of first-person present-tense knowledge attributions in which the attributor is aware of his practical interests. SSI delivers the same results as contextualism for these cases. The same goes for first-person versions of the lottery puzzle. The contextualist says that the sentence ‘I don't know my ticket is a loser’ is true in a context in which the possibility that one wins is salient, even though it wasn't true in a previous context when that possibility wasn't salient (e.g., because, as in Hawthorne's example, one is thinking about whether one will have enough money to go on Safari next year). For the contextualist, the change in truth-value is due to the association of a higher epistemic standard in the later context than in the former, and this association is made possible by the content-shifting power of salience. The SSIist, piggybacking off the contextualist, may say that salience destroys knowledge. When the possibility of your winning wasn't salient, you knew you would lose. Now that it is, you don't know. And the same case could be made for skeptical arguments. The SSIist might say that the salience of the possibility that one is a brain in a vat strips one of much of one's empirical knowledge. These anti-intellectualist manoeuvres incur an explanatory burden, for it is unclear how salience of possible error, or raised practical stakes, could destroy knowledge. But the view does at least match contextualism in its claims about the truth-values of first-person present-tense knowledge attributions and denials. Moreover, the SSIist doesn't make the vindication of our intuitions about cases dependent on delicate use/mention issues, such as the distinction between the question of whether what is said in uttering ‘I know that p’ is true and the question of whether the subject knows that p. It appears, then, that we have a prima facie case for thinking that either contextualism or SSI is true. But which? One consideration that might seem to favor contextualism is the fact that SSI predicts the truth of odd-sounding temporal and modal embeddings. It sounds wrong to say “I don't know that p, but, assuming p is true, I used to know that p,” or “If I didn't have so much at stake, then if p were true, I'd know it was.” But SSIists seem committed to the potential truth of both of these utterances. Is this a reason to favor contextualism over SSI? Stanley suggests (pp. 107–13) that contextualists might find themselves committed to similarly peculiar temporal and modal embeddings, depending on how they explain the source of context-sensitivity. If so, these oddities would be no reason to favor contextualism over SSI. He considers in particular David Lewis's (1996) contextualism, according to which knowledge-ascribing sentences contain a context-sensitive quantifier under semantic analysis. Under Lewis's account, ‘S knows that p’ is true in a context iff ‘S has evidence which rules out all possibilities in which not-p’ is true in the context, with ‘all possibilities’ contextually restricted to those that are not being properly ignored in the context, where attention to a possibility is one way of not being properly ignored. Because the best semantic account of quantifiers holds that they express properties, it would seem that Lewis is committed to thinking that the relevant property is not being properly ignored by A, where A is the attributor. But then we should expect that a sentence such as ‘If A were properly ignoring more possibilities than he is, S would know that p, if p were true’ to be acceptable, which of course it isn't. We have a reservation about Stanley's argument. Consider his example of ‘every bottle’. In a context of use, this expresses a property, e.g., being a bottle on such and such shelf. Which property it expresses depends on what is salient to the attributor or conversational participants, but the property expressed itself is not about salience to a certain attributor. Thus, ‘John bought every bottle but wouldn't have if I had been thinking about a different grocery store’ won't come out true. Similarly, it seemed to us that one could revamp Lewis's view by proposing that which property ‘all possibilities’ expresses in a context of use depends on what the attributor is properly ignoring but the property expressed isn't itself about the attributor and his ignorings. So, perhaps SSI is committed to the peculiar sounding embeddings in a way that contextualism isn't. Nonetheless, there are ways to soften the blow. As Hawthorne (177n.40) remarks, anyone who thinks barn façade cases are Gettier cases must say that in many cases in which you look at a barn it is true to say, “I know that's a barn, but if unbeknownst to me there were a lot of barn facades around then even if this one was a barn I wouldn't know it was.” The defeasibility of knowledge, too, generates odd-sounding predictions like this: “I don't know that Mary is sick, now that her boyfriend told me she was faking it, but if he is misleading me, then if he hadn't told me anything, I would know (having seen her coughing earlier today).” If we can live with these embeddings, perhaps we can live with SSI's temporal and modal embeddings as well. SSIists, however, must further part company with contextualists on third person knowledge attributions. When Mary and John, whose evidence is the same as Smith's, utter not only ‘We don't know’ but also ‘And neither does Smith,’ the intellectualist contextualist will say that Mary and John speak the truth about Smith if they speak the truth about themselves. The SSIist will of course have to insist that this move is in general illicit, because, e.g., less might be at stake for Smith than for Mary and John or fewer counterpossibilities of error salient to him. Yet we seem to make this move on a regular basis. It would be very odd for Mary and John to wonder, “We don't know whether the plane stops in Chicago, but if it does, then Smith knows it does.” The SSIist has to explain away mistakes about third-person knowledge attributions and denials. Keith DeRose (2004) has called this the problem with SSI. Hawthorne and Stanley are well aware of it, and propose their own solutions. The core idea behind both proposals, spelled out most clearly in Stanley (who is trying to improve upon Hawthorne's account (see pp. 162–66)), is that we treat others as if they were in our situation, having our stakes (or finding salient possibilities we find salient). Stanley puts it this way: our real aim is to deny that if they were in our situation they'd know. Indeed, they wouldn't. But what is strictly said, that they don't know, is false. (101–4) This proposal is committed to an error theory about some of our knowledge attributions. But, as Hawthorne and Stanley would be quick to point out, contextualism has a similar problem because as we noted above, contextualists place heavy weight on the use/mention distinction. Mary and John are happy to assert not only ‘Smith doesn't know’ but ‘What Smith said is false. He doesn't know any more than we do.’ Equally worrisome, Stanley notes that contextualists have to strain, more than SSIists, to accommodate intuitions about other third person cases—cases in which the attributor has lower stakes than the subject. Stanley calls such cases Low Attributor-High Stakes and claims that contextualism delivers the wrong result about them. Intuitively, Stanley claims, the speaker's attribution of knowledge to the subject is false, whereas contextualism predicts its truth. Contextualism in his view also than SSI in certain person cases, such as Stakes which a subject thinks her stakes are but they are He that the weight of the versions of the stakes-shifting SSI over contextualism. does not that contextualism is false. Therefore, there is a way to accommodate without Stanley's intuitions about all the versions of the stakes cases, by for a contextualist of it is part of the for knowledge attributions that that p’ only when the subject is to as if p in of the So, when a attributor says of a subject knows that p,” the attributor that intellectualist contextualism, it will have to to This takes of all but the subject has stakes, but we have the the attributor when she says, doesn't know that handle this case, we the contextualist when one's stakes that one a certain standard to know, in one's speech context associated with having an epistemic that at least that so that if a subject doesn't it with to p, the subject doesn't with to p in one's speech possibility for all the stakes-shifting cases is to with a view which would also have the over contextualism that it doesn't different intuitions depending on whether the say or he said is rather than doesn't The possibility of these of up the to the epistemological question of whether intellectualism is true from both the semantic question of whether knowledge-ascribing sentences in content across contexts of use and the question of whether knowledge-ascribing can only be true relative to an (e.g., a or an epistemic Stanley is right that intellectualism is a for contextualism for in the of stakes-shifting cases. As Stewart in contextualist from his case of Smith and Mary and John, what is in the is a good enough reason for Smith to know, then it is a good enough reason for John and Mary to But there is no reason an anti-intellectualist to semantic or are to accommodate intuitions such as those in the cases. the are as as we know no one is on as they do the cases. these we are with intellectualist contextualism and each of which is committed to error about our to some of the cases at has to to accommodate those It will seem to some that all this and in the is an Consider what Hawthorne calls This is intellectualist invariantism with the claim that the standards for knowledge are enough so that a many of our knowledge claims are in fact true. it is that contextualism and SSI are committed to error of their own about the versions of the bank cases, there is now no from consideration of those cases, to invariantism just because it requires its own error theory to handle we to the invariantism, is a reason to that knowledge, or even is to salience or practical in the such factors are not truth-related or the used in standard Gettier misleading into the at we little in salience of possible error as a subject seems to us to be no other than the to the cases, to a between knowledge and salience of possible The situation is more for knowledge and This is the of our Hawthorne us to the are a for a lottery ticket that cost a in a ticket lottery with a and reason as I will the If I the ticket I will If I the I will a I to the This he claims, is The is that you don't know the is true. this lottery case to Hawthorne's A or so you bought a lottery ticket in a ticket the in a at I won't have enough money to go on Safari next the less as to the This is In Hawthorne's because you know the is true. like these are used to support Hawthorne's one is to use p as a in practical if and only if one knows that Hawthorne that it is to give the the difference between the and the other the lottery is that in the case the for the subject that he will is enough so as to be to the practical issues at he can the epistemic that is This knowledge out in favor of a about you can use p in practical just in case the that p is false is just in case it can be in your practical this the If this is so we give in and accept Hawthorne's is to appeal to the according to which that p is and for having epistemic or for being or for there being no epistemic for the subject that the epistemic of is the same in both cases or If it is the then by the you don't know that you will in the you don't know, in the lottery case, that you will the But if you don't that, then by you don't know that you won't have enough money to go on But the seems to be a of knowledge. Thus, Hawthorne that if the epistemic of is the same in the two cases, then skepticism So, skepticism the for you of winning between the cases, and so by the the two cases differ with to your knowledge that your ticket will lose. It follows that practical can affect knowledge in the way We can think of two ways to to Hawthorne's argument. one might argue that you know in the case isn't to in the case you do have a lottery and might be have a reason to think you might have enough money to go on Safari next In response Hawthorne (pp. argues that lottery cases can be at will for just about any of our claims to knowledge. If so, then there is about the case, because there is about the of that is a lottery one might question the We with this are the relevant to between If your epistemic for p is then, it should follow that you would be to accept a on p at any But you wouldn't be to do this for very many doesn't think he would on the of at any Thus, the seems to One can to this as Hawthorne does, by intellectualism about epistemic and so that how a proposition is for a person can with practical This seems to us If you me a on the proposition this will come up that doesn't seem to lower its and not to the that it will come up us the Is there any other reason to knowledge into the of certain of practical are and others not just on the If you an when a for his lottery he isn't to it, he will you that he doesn't know that the ticket will lose. If you the same in the he the rather than the given that he of on he will answer that he knows he won't have enough money to go on seem to knowledge its to their As Stanley A standard use of knowledge attributions is to When I I to the on the rather than the on the right, I will by that I knew that the on the had the I but I not know whether the on the right When my wife me I rather than I that I knew that it was the to go to the If we could have a view that knowledge relevant but doesn't us to the this might seem to just the right And it such a view is We can claim that knowledge is with a epistemic of error but only an This view at least the of Hawthorne's will of course to the Stanley as having rather than semantic The idea would be that there are cases in which one knows but isn't to on it, that one knows often or at least in some way that one is to on it Stanley is well aware of this and a to come up with a We that it is not easy to give such a (see our but we that he shifts the of As we above, many in our view will insist that intellectualism is a cost than positing or intellectualism us to the claim that you can or knowledge, not by or by but by or up a large check. And that seems Is there a more argument available for a When it to would deny that when can be to other It does not follow from the fact that your is even from the fact that you that you have a reason to that your won't But you know that your is you have an reason to that your won't that your is So, when it to we do to say that, when you know that p, p can be your your for course, when you know that p, p can to be your for some for the very reason that p has to do with if you know that your is that it is is not a reason you have for that is from the than But its to be a reason you in this case, is not the result of the for you that your is not the result of any other epistemic you have with to the proposition that your is When you know that p, in the for you that doesn't in the way of p being a reason you have for We can say very similar about the very there are facts such that, when you know to be true, they can be you have to do The fact that your will be by a which is the you and in the next seems to be such a that the of this fact would not that you have any reason to your (having no idea of the situation, you would be it in on the with your would your in it if be enough if that itself were not But if you know this then you do have a reason to your This is a of the situation. As with the situation, when you know that p, p might to be a reason you have for but not because of any epistemic of with to because for example, the for you that might know that your is But this is not a reason you have to your out of the way of an its to be a reason you have is not due to any epistemic with to the proposition that your is seems little to the practical and the cases in the way by the If the that doesn't in the way of p being a reason you have for for any then the that doesn't in the way of p being a reason you have for A, for any This other of the fact that, when we that p in the course of about what to we don't then p off from our about what to When we p, we can use p. But, noted that, when you know that p, then the that doesn't in the way of p being a reason you have for in with the a general not those by and more in a by Hawthorne and Stanley If you know that p, then the that doesn't in the way of p being a reason you have for or a problem for intellectualism if there are of for the that is the but are such that the that in the way of p being a reason one has but not the Consider again the airport Smith and Mary and John are with to the that the plane stops in According to the Smith and Mary and John all know that the plane stops in the that the plane doesn't stop in doesn't in the way of it being a reason they have say, In case, at For Mary and John, there is. and the assumption that Mary and John have knowledge, Mary and John have an reason not to checking with the a of the case is so that they should check with the given all that is at So, the had better not Mary and reason to just go and to Mary and John in just and How might the that the plane stops in is a reason that Mary and John have to the that, even if they have a very good reason to in their reason is by some other reason they The A proposition about the of error with the of the relevant or to use the a proposition to the that checking further A general intellectualist then, for is to make a first, having to do with of error can with about what is in fact the case and second, when the stakes are about of error can out about what is in fact the This is For this would seem to the sort of the one the plane stops the other it might And if it doesn't it the are I'd better check further to it stops in it This is not what we do when we we we do when we is the at and which is more the one the other Which is more the good or the that both that we don't facts the that those facts don't if we were facts would the one the plane is to the other it might not Which is more the fact that it is, or the that it In the intellectualist what seems to be a about having When you have a reason to or about when you have a reason to to that reason for in whether to This is not to say that, you have a reason to you should But it is to say that, when you have that you to it into with other you have without the relative of those In this you have are might not have as that it will that you will have to for the If you do then when whether to your you might have to the that it will how long you think have to for the if you have both as then you can use both in your without their to and have to So, to if I don't the Because this off the intellectualist there is us from on the of that if knowledge is with a of error, then knowledge can come and go with in the practical If Hawthorne's is false, so is
Background theories in science are used both to prove and to disprove that theory choice is underdetermined by data. The alleged proof appeals to the fact that experiments to decide between theories typically require auxiliary assumptions from other theories. If this generates a kind of underdetermination, it shows that standards of scientific inference are fallible and must be appropriately contextualized. The alleged disproof appeals to the possibility of suitable background theories to show that no theory choice can be timelessly or noncontextually underdetermined: Foreground theories might be distinguished against different backgrounds. Philosophers have often replied to such a disproof by focussing their attention not on theories but on Total Sciences. If empirically equivalent Total Sciences were at stake, then there would be no background against which they could be differentiated. I offer several reasons to think that Total Science is a philosophers’ fiction. No respectable underdetermination can be based on it.
Zero-knowledge proofs are proofs that are both convincing and yet yield nothing beyond the validity of the assertion being proven. Since their introduction about twenty years ago, zero-knowledge proofs have attracted a lot of attention and have, in turn, contributed to the development of other areas of cryptography and complexity theory.
Zero knowledge protocols provide a way of proving that a statement is true without revealing anything other than the correctness of the claim. Zero knowledge protocols have practical applications in cryptography and are used in many applications. While some applications only exist on a specification level, a direction of research has produced real-world applications. Zero knowledge protocols, also referred to as zero knowledge proofs, are a type of protocol in which one party, called the prover, tries to convince the other party, called the verifier, that a given statement is true. Sometimes the statement is that the prover possesses a particular piece of information. This is a special case of zero knowledge protocol called a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge. Formally, a zero-knowledge proof is a type of interactive proof.
ARE CONCLUSIVE PROOFS IRRELEVANT TO RELIGION? FOR CENTURIES the proofs for God's existence have been debated and their role in religious belie£-systems assessed. There have been those who claim that the proofs are conclusive, those who claim that they are invalid , and those who claim that they are valid but inconclusive . There have been disputes, furthermore, as to whether the logical base for religious belie£ systems should be sought in proofs and evidence rather than in "self-authenticating" religious experiences and acceptance o£ religious authority. But no one, until recently, ever contended that even if the proofs were conclusive it would be irrelevant to religious believers. People have thought that religion must be undergirded by proof, aan be undergirded by proof, and need not be undergirded by proof, but not that proof would be irrelevant. Now o£ course there are many senses in which a proof could be relevant to religious believers. The Vatican Council affirmed that i£ people denied that God could be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason they would be anathema. Thus it could have made quite serious practical differences to a believer whether he accepted the proofs or not. As philosophers we are not concerned with this sort of practical difference but with philosophical ones, and the question to be explored is: Is there something philosophically at stake for believers in this question o£ the proofs for the existence o£ God? I want to contend that Steven M. Cahn is utterly wrongheaded in his claim that religious believers have no real interest in philosophical proofs for the existence of God.1 I am assuming that this 1 Steven M. Cahn, " The Irrelevance to Religion of Philosophic Proofs for the Existence of God," The American Philosophical Quarterly (April, 1969), pp. 170-72. Further citations will be given by page number in the text. Cahn has 727 7~8 FRANK B. DILLEY is not a statistical claim to be settled by polls but rather a philosophical claim. Cahn makes no effort to produce questionnaire results from a proper sample of believers nor shall I. To examine this question, in the context of Cahn's contention , it is fortunately not necessary to resolve the question of the validity of the proofs. In an effort to dismiss them once for all, Cahn is willing to assume that the proofs are valid, for the sake of the argument. " Suppose we assume, contrary to what most philosophers, I among them, believe, that all of these proofs are valid. Let us grant the necessary existence (whatever that might mean) of the most perfect conceivable Being, a Being who is ali-good and is the designer and creator of the universe. What implications can be drawn from this fact which would be of relevance to human life? In other words, what difference would it make in men's lives if God existed?" (p. 170) In support of his surprising thesis that religious believers are right in ignoring the proofs, he gives two chief arguments, that religious believers make their decisions as to what beliefs to hold and what practices to follow on the basis of "self-validating " personal experiences which render the proofs unnecessary , and that the success of the proofs would not enable a newly converted unbeliever to know what beliefs and practices to choose. He therefore contends that the proofs are relevant for neither the believer nor the unbeliever. In examining his contention about the relevancy of proofs I propose to look at what religious belief systems say about this problem, an approach Cahn does not seem to care to use. In this connection it should be noted that his sources are curious, for he cites not one person who would be taken by anyone to be a normal religious believer. He cites Antony Flew, Wallace Matson, C. B. Martin, and Mordecai Kaplan, but not John reprinted this essay in his Philosophy of Religion (Harper & Row, 1970), and it can also be found in Philosophy in the Age of Crisis, ed. Eleanor Kuykendall (Harper & Row, 1970) and God, Man, and Rdigion: Readings in the Philosophy of Rdigion, ed. by Keith Yandell (McGraw-Hill, 1973). ARE CONCLUSIVE PROOFS IRRELEVANT...