Thinking about Normativity: Ralph Wedgwood on 'Ought'

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

On Normativity

Judith Jarvis Thomson's Normativity (2008) is a formidable book in terms of both content and style (all otherwise unattributed page references in what follows are to this book). The structure is modular, as though to encourage the reader who wants to dip in and out. But as you read it becomes clear that dipping in and out would not be a good idea. Questions that occur to you are sometimes addre...

A Critical Study on Three Explanations about the Real State of “Ehical Ought to”

Avoiding the ethical relativism and providing the preparations of ethical education are among the most important concerns of scholars in the field of ethics. Two theories of i`tibariat and realism about ethical cases of ought to are discussed among Muslim scholars each seeking to overcome the problem of ethical relativism. It seems that attempts for illustrating the ethical cases of ought to an...