On Skepticism About EBLIP: Friendly or Otherwise!

Skepticism about Character Traits

Sartre (1956) describes ways in which one may present oneself to others as being a certain sort of person. In one of his examples, a waiter presents himself as a waiter by as it were acting the part of a waiter. More generally, Sartre argues that, wanting to be, or at least to appear to others to be, a person of a certain sort or character, one often acts the part of a person of that sort of ch...

Response to “Skepticism about desert”

Swartzer concludes the paper with the claim that desert is not a basic normative notion. It cannot “supply first principles of justice.” (p. 1) In other words, desert is to be defined in terms of justice, not the other way around. What we deserve just is what we are to receive according to the demands of justice. On this view, to say that a just distribution of goods is such that everyone recei...

Acquaintance and Skepticism about the Past

I consider the problem of skepticism about the past within Richard Fumerton’s acquaintance theory of noninferential justification. Acts of acquaintance occur within the fleeting present. But if the data for noninferential justification is limited to the fleeting present then the options for avoiding a far-reaching skepticism are quite limited. I consider Fumerton’s responses to skepticism about...

Some Skepticism About Normative Constitutional Advice

The man behind the curtain: Overcoming skepticism about creative computers

The common misconception among non-specialists is that a computer program can only perform tasks which the programmer knows how to perform (albeit much faster). This leads to a belief that if an artificial system exhibits creative behavior, it only does so because it is leveraging the programmer’s creativity. We review past efforts to evaluate creative systems and identify the biases against th...