Les discussions récentes au sujet des rapports entre sciences et sociétés concourent aux impératifs politiques pour la diffusion des connaissances qui transcendent les disciplines. Je soutiens qu'un argument pour la diffusion des résultats de la recherche en sciences, technologie, ingénierie et mathématiques (STIM) serait valable pour les sciences humaines et sociales (SHS). Je précise les conséquences de cette transposition en prenant l'exemple de la recherche en philosophie. J'aboutis à la conclusion que l'obstacle principal à la diffusion des résultats dans ce domaine est la reconnaissance d'une expertise philosophique.

Social conventionalism — the position that social conventions governing language use determine or constitute the meanings of our words — has faced two major problems. The first is the Agreement Problem: how could speakers agree to use words in certain ways without already speaking meaningfully? The second is the Novelty Problem: how can conventions fix the meanings of innovative uses of words? David Lewis famously responded to the Agreement Problem but his account flounders on the Novelty Problem. Josh Armstrong emends Lewis’ account to solve the Novelty Problem. I argue that Armstrong's emendation fails and that neither he nor Lewis has an adequate response to the Agreement Problem.

Response-dependence about moral responsibility argues that someone is morally responsible if and only if, and because, they're an appropriate target of reactive attitudes. But if we can be partially morally responsible, and if reactive attitudes are too coarse-grained to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents, then response-dependence is false. Shawn Wang dubs this the “Granularity Challenge.” This article rejects the second premise of the Granularity Challenge. Human emotions are fine-grained enough to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents. One illustrative example of this, I argue, is how children gradually emerge as partially responsible agents.

Philosophers and psychologists acclaim Edward C. Tolman's “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men” as an early, transformative instance of representationalist explanation. The article is said to mark a move by Tolman to renounce his behaviorism and to herald a new, cognitivist psychology. I argue, opposingly, that framing the text with reference to later psychology badly distorts its meaning. The text is better understood with respect to the contexts of its age and deeper currents in the history of psychology. Tolman is not upturning behaviorism; he is re-litigating an intramural debate between behaviorists pertaining to the place of physiology in psychology.

Given the rising trend of politicizing formerly mundane topics, philosophers should guard against the concepts we develop being misunderstood or misconstrued to support arguments we never intended. To demonstrate my assertion, I develop the case study of Alex Kacelnik's notion of “biological rationality” (B-rationality) and show ways in which I believe it is vulnerable to misuse and ways I would suggest re-engineering it to be more resistant. I conclude by urging scholars — especially those working on normatively laden topics — to design our concepts such that they are less likely to become associated with harmful discourse or even oppressive policies.

Looking at Canadian provincial pediatric health care policies and laws, the best interest standard (BIS) enjoys support. Within philosophy, however, the BIS faces serious opposition. Granted, there remain a few fervent defenders of the BIS in the contemporary literature; however, I argue that while some authors nominally defend the BIS, my analysis reveals that what they really defend is at best a watered down version of it. In this article, I argue that not only must the BIS be understood narrowly, but a substitute decision-maker (SDM) must satisfy the BIS — for an SDM is her patient's fiduciary.

This article concerns the criteria for when a group can collectively hold a belief. By proposing a cognitive non-summative account of group belief (GB), I highlight three necessary features at the individual level: commonality, mutuality, and group-based considerations. My account asserts that group G believes proposition p if and only if a sufficient majority of its members believe (1) pG, where pG is “Given some G-based considerations, p,” and (2) “the majority of G also believe that pG.” The article critiques three significant accounts of GB: Anthony Quinton's simple summative account, Margaret Gilbert's and Raimo Tuomela's conative non-summative views, and Jennifer Lackey's modified summativism.

Is there a necessary connection between law and morality? Elizabeth Anscombe's theory of civil authority provides the basis for a unique intervention into this debate. Her distinction between the rights internal to a practice and the external justification of said practice avoids the traditional objections to both legal positivism and natural law theories.

Our social identity affects what we believe. But, how should we epistemically evaluate this doxastic impact? Achieving a robust picture of the epistemic significance of social identity requires us to explore the understudied intersection of irrelevant influences and standpoint epistemology, which leads us to cases of double higher-order evidence. Reflecting on social identity through the lens of irrelevant influences gives us higher-order evidence of error, while reflecting through the lens of standpoint advantage gives us higher-order evidence of accuracy. We must weigh the strength of each piece of higher-order evidence case by case to epistemically evaluate the doxastic impact of social identity.

La noétique de Pierre d'Auriol présente une théorie originale de l'intention, en partie fondée sur une relecture de la thèse des deux sujets de l'intellection prônée par Averroès. Auriol pose que l'intention possède deux sujets, mais varie dans le schéma qu'il produit en se confrontant aux difficultés qu'entraîne son affirmation. Cet article propose de tracer la genèse, les développements et les conséquences de cette théorie.

Most objections against Henry Thoreau aim at his “unfriendly” provocations. In this article, I argue that we need to situate his exhortative style in the context of practicing parrhesia or the bold expression of truth in the Socratic tradition of philosophy. Philosophical parrhesia can be defined as the practice of speaking the truth with an eye to bringing home the realization that one must change one's life. The transformation Thoreau has in mind is hinged upon acquiring the practical knowledge of cultivating the senses through what he calls “excursion.” This, I argue, is his key contribution to the said tradition.

Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's “basic desires” to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting “basic desires” to sensory inclinations that cause us to do things independently of our beliefs about their contents.