Unexceptional Moral Knowledge

Psychopaths and Moral Knowledge

Unexceptional spatial memory in an exceptional memorist.

Rajan Mahadevan evidences an exceptional memory for arrays of digits. We tested whether Rajan's spatial memory was likewise exceptional. Eight control Ss and Rajan were instructed to remember the position and orientation of 48 images of common objects shown either to the left or the right of fixation and facing either left or right. Rajan's accuracy for judging whether the position and orientat...

Exceptional river gorge formation from unexceptional floods.

An understanding of rates and mechanisms of incision and knickpoint retreat in bedrock rivers is fundamental to perceptions of landscape response to external drivers, yet only sparse field data are available. Here we present eye witness accounts and quantitative surveys of rapid, amphitheatre-headed gorge formation in unweathered granite from the overtopping of a rock-cut dam spillway by small-...

Moral knowledge: some reflections on moral controversies, incompatible moral epistemologies, and the culture wars.

An authentic Christian bioethical account of abortion must take into consideration the conflicting epistemologies that separate Christian moral theology from secular moral philosophy. Moral epistemologies directed to the issue of abortion that fail to appreciate the orientation of morality to God will also fail adequately to appreciate the moral issues at stake. Christian accounts of the bioeth...

An Unexceptional Semantics for Expressions of Exception

Exceptive phrases formed with but can occur with universal quantifiers, as in every student but John came, where it is entailed that John did not come, and that every other student came. They cannot, however, occur with other quantifiers (e.g. *some student but John came) or with definites (*the students but John came). Building on ideas in von Fintel (1993), Gajewski (2008, 2013) proposes a ge...