New Books in Philosophy

Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world, such as race and gender. Social constructionists argue that these categories are not biological or natural and that alleviating social injustice begins with recognizing they are not. At the same time, the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman born of white parents who considers herself black, makes clear that even if race is not biological, it doesn’t follow that race is a matter of personal choice. So how should we understand what social construction involves? In The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford University Press, 2016), Ron Mallon articulates a view of social construction that draws on philosophy, psychology, and social theory. He identifies an element of essentialist thinking in some human kind concepts, and elaborates the mechanisms by which human categories and our representations of those categories form a constructivist loop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Plato goes on to object that democracies are suspicious of the very idea of expertise in political matters. Long traditions in political philosophy have proposed various responses to Plato. According to a predominant trend in contemporary democratic theory, public deliberation can serve to meet Plato’s challenges. Yet appeals to public deliberation seem to reintroduce some of Plato’s worries. Does the commitment to public deliberation suggest, with Plato, that wisdom should rule? How can a democracy introduce an ideal of public deliberation that remains democratic? In Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Alfred Moore examines the role of expertise in democratic deliberation. He defends the idea that the epistemic authority of experts derives its political force from processes of popular contestation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, philosophers of science have debated the role of non-epistemic values and interests in science, generally agreeing that such influences are undesirable even if they are inevitable. In Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Jan de Winter argues that the direct influence of non-epistemic interests in science is not invariably epistemically problematic. In his view, what is mistaken for an epistemic problem is often simply a lack of transparency regarding the interests involved in how scientific decisions have been reached. De Winter, who is an independent scholar, also defends a conception of epistemic integrity in the conduct of scientific research that does not presuppose a distinction between interests that are external to science (such as financial interests) and those which are internal to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-conscious thought? We aren’t born with it, and while we may not be the only creatures that can think thoughts about ourselves, this ability does not seem to be very widespread. For starters, to be able to think of oneself, it seems one must first possess a concept of the self of what the “I” refers to. In Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self (MIT Press, 2015), Kristina Musholt provides a naturalistic account of how self-conscious thought develops: how we move from possessing implicitly self-referential information to having explicit self-representation. Musholt, who is professor of cognitive anthropology at Leipzig University, argues that this is a multistage process driven by social interaction and the recognition of other beings’ perspectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death, a lost mountain hiker may rightfully break into and make use of a heated cabin that is not his property. But what justifies this idea? And what are its implications for a world where millions are subjected to sustained and systematic depravation? In The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) Alejandra Mancilla defends the idea that under the current global order, those who are subject to such systematic depravation have a right to take, use, seize, and occupy what is needed in order to satisfy requirements for basic subsistence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates research in mechanistic and psychological explanation, computability theory, and other areas to provide a detailed account of the sense in which some, but not all, physical systems compute, and in which genuine computing systems need not be defined in terms of semantic or representational properties. Piccinini, a professor of philosophy at University of Missouri St. Louis, also argues that the mind is not strongly autonomous from its physical implementation but it is not thereby reduceable to physical mechanisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explicitly statements that identify some act as the one to be performed from a broader set of alternatives. Accordingly, we recognize that a consideration which favors some act among one set of options might favor a different act among a different set of options. This has led some to think that normative reasons are fundamentally contrastive in structure. This is to say that a reason to perform some act is always a reason to perform that act rather than some other act. Contrastivism about normative reasons is the view according to which there is no reason simpliciter to perform a given act; a reason to perform some act A is always a reason to A given some background of alternatives. As it captures the general structure of normative reasoning, contrastivism sounds intuitive. But a lot of work needs doing in order to flesh out the details. In Contrastive Reasons (Oxford University Press, 2017), Justin Snedegar develops and defends a novel version of contrastivism about moral reasons. He then extends the view to normative reasons of other kinds by offering an analysis of when it is rational to withhold belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, there is in addition a distinct, positive variety of moral shame a virtue that, as Bongrae Seok writes, “is not for losers but for self-reflective moral leaders”. In Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness (Rowman and Littlefield), Seok draws on textual evidence from Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, as well as contemporary moral psychology, anthropology, biology, linguistics, and ancient Greek philosophy, to illuminate one aspect of the rich Confucian tradition in moral psychology. Seok, who is associate professor of philosophy at Alvernia University, explains how moral shame involves the whole self’s sensitivity to moral ideals and supports the Confucian virtues of self-cultivation, self-reflection and learning.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

The freedoms prized and secured in a modern liberal democratic societies give rise to significant forms of moral and social diversity. In many cases, these forms of diversity must be dealt with by the state and its citizens. A standard way of trying to address social diversity is to call for toleration. But toleration can seem to have a dark side: it might appear that we tolerate only that which we, to some degree, disparage or disapprove of. In this way, toleration might also be a way of affirming ones superiority to those who one tolerates. Toleration, then, might look like an inappropriate response to diversity within a liberal democratic society. In Respecting Toleration: Traditional Liberalism and Contemporary Diversity (Oxford University Press, 2017), Peter Balint defends toleration as the appropriate response to moral and social diversity in a liberal democratic political order. Drawing on a distinction between toleration as a general attitude of permissiveness, and tolerance as a more particular disposition of forbearance, Balint argues that a familiar form of liberal toleration is the proper response to moral and social diversity in a democratic society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different ways that are or at least seem to be incompatible in at least some respects. In Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models (MIT Press, 2014), David Danks proposes a version of this basic theory that links the mind closely with the computational framework used in machine learning: the idea that thinking involves manipulation of symbols encoded as graphical models. Danks, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that graphical models provide a unifying explanation of why we are able to move smoothly between different cognitive processes and why we are able to focus on features of situations that are relevant to our goals. While the book includes the mathematics behind graphical models, Danks explains his proposal in accessible yet precise terms for the non-mathematically trained reader. He discusses how graphical models work in causal reasoning, categorization, and other processes, how his view is related to more familiar cognitive frameworks, and some implications of his view for modularity and other traditional debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy