Leslie Stevenson

Why believe what people say

The basic alternatives seem to be either a Humean reductionist view that any particular assertion needs backing with inductive evidence for its reliability before it can retionally be believed, or a Reidian criterial view that testimony is intrinscially, though defeasibly, credible, in the absence of evidence against its reliability.Some recent arguments from the constraints on interpreting any linguistic performances as assertions with propositional content have some force against the reductionist view. We thus have reason to accept the criterial view, at least as applied to eyewitness reports. But these considerations do not establish that any rational enquirer must have the concept of other minds or testimony. The logical possibility of the lone enquirer, who uses symbols and thereby expresses some knowledge of his world, remains open — but it is a question we have no need to pronounce upon.The practice of accepting observation-statements is in fact extended to chains of testimonies believed to start in perception or in some other kind of justification, but the arguments for doing this are not so clear.

Is scientific research value‐neutral?

The conventional wisdom about the practice of science is that it is value‐free in the senses: (a) that science discovers facts, but there can be no scientific investigation of values; (b) that the only value recognized by the scientist qua scientist is that of knowing the truth; and (c) that the applications of scientific knowledge can, and should, be democratically decided by society as a whole. All three of these assumptions are open to question. Any human activity, including scientific research, involves a choice of how to spend time, effort, and resources; and given twentieth‐century realities about the funding and applications of research, such choices are becoming increasingly important in science.

Inspirations from Kant: Essays

1. Objects of Representation: Kants Copernican Revolution Re-interpreted 2. Synthetic Unities of Experience 3. Three Ways in which Space and Time might be said to be Transcendentally Ideal 4. The Given, the Unconditioned, the Transcendental Object, and the Reality of the Past 5. A Theory of Everything? - Kant speaks to Stephen Hawking 6. Opinion, Belief or Faith, and Knowledge 7. Freedom of Judgment in Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant 8. Six Levels of Mentality 9. A Kantian Defence of Freewill

Freedom of judgement in Descartes, Hume, Spinoza and Kant

Is our judgement of the truth-value of propositions subject to the will? Do we have any voluntary control over the formation of our beliefs – and if so, how does it compare with the control we have over our actions? These questions lead into interestingly unclear philosophical and psychological territory which remains a focus of debate today. I will first examine the classic early modern discussions in Descartes, Spinoza and Hume. Then I will review some relevant themes in Kant, including some lesser-known material from his lectures on ‘Logic’. Kant’s critical philosophy makes important appeal to the notion of ‘spontaneity’ or mental activity, but I argue that there are five different kinds of spontaneity in Kant which need distinguishing. I hope thus to achieve some clarification of the differences between theoretical judgements and practical decisions.

Mind, Brain and Mental Illness

The distinction between mental illness and bodily illness would seem to presuppose some sort of distinction between mind and body. But dualist theories that the mind is a substance separable from the body, or that mental events could occur without any bodily events, raise ancient conceptual problems, which I do not propose to review here. What I want to do is to examine the psychiatric implications of materialist theories, which hold that the mind is the brain, or a function of the brain. If all character has a basis in chemistry, can we still attribute some mental distress to character and some to chemistry, as if the two categories were different?

Who's afraid of determinism?

Because of the idealizations involved in the ideas of a total state of the world and of all the laws of nature, the thesis of all-encompassing determinism is unverifiable. Our everyday non-scientific talk of causation does not imply determinism; nor is it needed for the Kantian argument for a general causal framework as a condition for experience of an objective world. Determinism is at best a regulative ideal for science, something to be approached but never reached.

The Arms Trade and the Slave Trade

We have abandoned the slave trade, and come to abhor it. Could the same happen with the arms trade? Even if we are not pacifists, and allow some use of force in self-defence, we must have serious ethical questions to ask about the trade in weaponry on which our economies are now so dependent. I distinguish the various forms these questions take for governments and individuals, and argue for some answers.

Experiences in the cave, the closet and the vat- and in bed

The notion of experience plays a deeply ambiguous role in philosophical thinking. In ordinary discourse we say that applicants for employment as joiner, farmhand or nanny should have some previous experience with carpentry, livestock or children. Such uses of the word clearly presuppose the existence of the relevant objects of experience. In other usages the focus is more on the mental effect on the subject (without doubting the existence of the relevant objects), as when someone says that they have had several unpleasant experiences that day–a wetting in a thunderstorm, an altercation with a traffic warden, and a long wait at the station.

Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence.

Preface Introduction Part I. Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence: 1. Some paradoxes of deterrence 2. A paradox of deterrence revisited 3. Deterrence, utility and rational choice 4. Nuclear deterrence: some moral perplexities 5. Dilemmas of nuclear protest Part II. Alternative to Nuclear Deterrence: 6. Unilateral nuclear disarmament 7. World government 8. Strategic defense 9. Nuclear coercion 10. Mutual nuclear disarmament Notes Index.

Is Nuclear Deterrence Ethical

We are morally perplexed about nuclear weapons. Popular debate oscillates tediously between an apparently impractical idealism which would have nothing to do with the things, and a military and political realism which insists that we have to use such means to attain our legitimate ends. The choice, it too often seems, is between laying down our nuclear arms–thus avoiding the moral odium of resting our defence policies on threats to vaporize millions of civilians–but leaving ourselves open to domination by those who do not feel such scruples, and on the other hand, retaining such weapons as long as our potential enemies possess them, constantly maintaining parity with the other side–in other words, proceeding with the arms race. The respective proponents of principle and of prudence typically fail to understand how others can possibly neglect the considerations which loom so large in their own minds. Each has at bottom a deeply held ethical view–that certain means (deployment of nuclear weapons) may not be used for any end, or that certain ends (defending our freedom and national sovereignty) are so important that they justify the use of almost any means. The disagreement is so irreconcilable that it spills out from TV studios and newspaper editorial pages on to the streets and the missile bases, and into the courts and the prisons.