I'm very pleased to have the opportunity comment on Declan Smithies’ thought-provoking, creative, and ambitious book: The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (‘ERC’).1 Unfortunately I can only discuss a small selection issues that it covers here. I'll focus conception belief Smithies defends in Ch. 4–5 (and further 7–10): beliefs as dispositions cause judgments—specifically, one-track phenomenally ...

According to the standard view, a belief is based on reason and doxastically justified—i.e., permissibly held—only if causal relation obtains between belief. In this paper, I argue that can be justified by reason’s mere disposition sustain it. Such disposition, however, wouldn’t establish connection unless it were manifested. My argument that, in cases have mind, manifestation of would add no p...

This paper assesses the parens patriae orientation, which is often considered to beat the core of the operation of juvenile courts, and discovers that existing ideas concerning its role must be revised. In opposition to common theory it appears that parens patriae at best shares influence with a number of other orientations in juvenile courts, and may even no longer exist as a distinct, unified...

Chapter 1 of this thesis concerns counterfactual conditionals. David Lewis has offered a natural and influential analysis of counterfactuals. But the analysis fails to take into account the asymmetry of entropy, and comes to grief precisely because of that failure. The cause of the grief is that processes involving the increase of entropy are exceedingly sensitive to small changes in their fina...

This study was undertaken to assess the critical thinking dispositions of undergraduate college students in a comprehensive university mainland China and examine roles gender major subjects’ dispositions. An adapted Chinese version California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) used survey 534 students. Statistics revealed that over 3/4 subjects were negative their think critically...