We’ve never lived on granite foundations. What we call “objectivity” in social and moral life is scaffolding: provisional, rhetorical, maintained through care, reciprocity, and revolt.

In my new essay, I map an operating model for reasoning without granite illusions — and argue for an ethic of repair.

Read the full post:
👉 https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/24/stop-pretending-we-live-in-marble-halls/

#Philosophy #Ethics #MetaEthics #PhilosophyOfScience #Epistemology #MetaPhilosophy #SocialEpistemology #CriticalTheory #Subjectivism #Relativism

Pills often feature in thought experiments to eliminate the difficulty of one of the response options. Example: It's hard to [X] in reality, but suppose you could [X] by taking a pill. Would you take the pill?

I got curious about whether people find it so easy to take pills. Apparently not.

In this meta-analysis, #medication non-adeherence was more than 40%: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-044987

#philosophy #metaphilosophy #experimentalPhilosophy #health

More successful predictions of my #BoundedReflectivism & #EpistemicIdentity article from 2022?

From about 2017 or 2018, I reviewed evidence suggesting that reflective thinking often helps, but may even hinder our judgment depending on factors like whether we are reasoning based on shared identities and epistemic standards (https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534).

Years later Robb Willer et al. solicited ideas for debiasing political judgments. After years of testing 25 different interventions, their results are published in #Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh4764

They found that biased evaluations of politicized facts were impacted by both
- REFLECTION (on potential misperceptions of undemocratic actions) and
- shared IDENTITY cues (which could help *or* hinder!)

#decisionScience #politics #psychology #philosophy #epistemology #metaphilosophy #JDM #debiasing #chatBot

🚨 Free book alert! (ePub and PDF!)

*Applying Reflective Equilibrium* shows each step of #reflectiveEquilibrium (RE), so anyone can use it.

This reveals the limits of reflective equilibrium, but also its real benefits.

Where to find it: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04333-8

#CriticalThinking #Logic #Ethics #Bioethics #Politics #Science #Medicine #Epistemology #Metaphilosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PrecautionaryPrinciple #Philosophy #OpenAccess

New book: Experimental Philosophy for Beginners

The book includes chapters on various experimental designs and analyses of various kinds of data (from numeric scores to text analysis): https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58049-9

Seems like a great foundation for a course on the topic or for self-learners to get their feet wet.

#xPhi #philosophy #psychology #quantiativeMethods #decisionScience #philosophyOfScience #Metaphilosophy #higherEd

How should #higherEd govern #freeSpeech?

A new (and free) paper in Philosophical Quarterly argues that the parties to this debate haven't sufficiently based their proposals on (a) the goals of #education or (b) scientific tests of their assumed mechanisms: https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqae095

#edu #policy #ethics #politics #logic #science #philosophyOfScience #metaphilosophy

Are there social class differences in moral decision-making?

When dissociating anti-social from deontological and utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, social class predicted differences in the latter two response patterns among thousands of German speakers — the class differences in utilitarian thinking were partially mediated by reflection and empathic concern.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1391214

#ethics #psychology #MoralPsychology #xPhi #philosophy #Demography #Metaphilosophy

By Mary Midgley

https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/rings-books/

> ... an account of human knowledge which women’s whole experience falsifies is inadequate and partial and capricious. Philosophers have generally talked for instance as though it were obvious that one consciousness went to one body, as though each person were a closed system which could only signal to another by external behaviour, and that behaviour had to be interpreted from previous experience.

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#metaphilosophy #feministPhilosophy