Philosophy prof; views tweeted are mine and not UMD's. Yup, I'm a liberal. Nope, I don't care whether you're an atheist.
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Joined November 2008
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Allen Stairs retweeted
Unpopular COVID take🧵: Just putting this out there—but if you’re not masking in public spaces anymore, your vulnerable friends/family/coworkers have clocked that you’re not a safe person and they’ll never forget it.
Trying to get some rough data. The issue isn't what you think about God. It's about how people understand the word "faith." If you have 90 seconds, I'd appreciate your (anonymous) answers to two simple multiple choice Qs.
forms.gle/GKBywnwe9WMpWiUY6
I need an umbrella word for propositional attitudes like belief that, assumption that, suspicion that... I mean propositional attitudes with a mind-to-world direction of fit and that can be mistaken. Extra points if constructions like "___ that P" work.
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Theory of knowledge types: A naive question. Suppose X believes that P and Y believes that not-P, but they have the same evidence, data, whatnot. Could they both be within their epistemic rights? (Warranted???)
FWIW, my instinct is to say yes.
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The usual story is that we can't decide to believe things, though we might be able to decide to accept them. What about disbelief? Has anyone talked about deciding _not_ to believe? (Full disclosure: my instinct is that it's possible.)
T. S. Eliot apparently said somewhere that he regarded Christianity as the least false of the available options. Leave aside whether he was right; not my issue. I need to track down the reference. Can anyone help?
Ta ever so much!
There's a ton of literature on assertion. Is there any on affirmation? (Reading something that uses both, assumes that they aren't synonyms, and says almost nothing about what the difference might be.)
Allen Stairs retweeted
Republicans are getting very upset people keep retweeting this ad so I figured I would post for any of you who haven’t seen it yet and then I am going to retweet myself tonight.
It makes sense to talk about uttering a sentence. I came across "utter a proposition" recently. Is this a thing? Or is it just shorthand for "utter a sentence that expresses the proposition"?
Allen Stairs retweeted
The Supreme Court has gone rogue. We are in a full-blown Constitutional crisis. Congress must act. And we must pressure Congress to act, while it still can. #TheMajority
If SCOTUS affirms this, it will be the day that American Democracy dies.
SCOTUS took the case today that asks whether state legislatures have sole power over election rules. That notion is extreme, historically imaginary, chaotic. If it succeeds it’s one of the most radical power grabs ever. No role for courts, state constitutions, governors, etc. 1/3
Allen Stairs retweeted
Read @rortybomb on the incredible labor market we have right now—one we can’t afford to sacrifice in the name of calming inflation thenation.com/article/econom…
Jack knows that physicists assert 'P' and he accepts their authority, but doesn't understand the physics. Can Jack believe that P? Or can he only believe that 'P' is true? Who talks about this?
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Almost an elegy; more like a lament for an undead country.
"Violence begets injury begets death, and any culture debased to vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end," @ebruenig writes: theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…