I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show two leading approaches (Coliva’s acceptance account Pritchard’s non-doxastic account) are vulnerable form incommensurability leads relativism. Building on both accounts, introduce new, minimally conception hinges avoids rationally resolves disagreements. According my proposed account, putative cas...

In The empirical stance, Bas van Fraassen argues for a reconceptualization of empiricism, and a rejection of its traditional rival, speculative metaphysics, as part of a larger and provocative study in epistemology. Central to his account is the notion of voluntarism in epistemology, and a concomitant understanding of the nature of rationality. In this paper I give a critical assessment of thes...

This paper proposes a framework based on Defeasible Logic (DL) to reason about normative modifications. We show how to express them in DL and how the logic deals with conflicts between temporalised normative modifications. Some comments will be given with regard to the phenomenon of retroactivity.

Health gap measures, such as the DALY, are a quantification of the gap between the current health status in a population and a stated goal for population health. This goal can be understood as an ideal situation in which everyone in a population lives into old age free of disease. Health gaps are the addition of time lost due to premature mortality, as measured against the normative survivorshi...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of normative social influence on group homogeneity in media preferences and group meeting outcomes in a setting where 58 student groups voluntarily used various communication media over a three-month software development project period. Group homogeneity in media preferences was argued to mediate the impact of normative social influence on group me...

global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. to arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. but there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

1 Truth-relativism For our purposes, truth-relativism can be characterised as the doctrine that in a single world the very same token utterance can take different truth-values when considered in different contexts of assessment. The root semantic idea is already present in Lewis’s 1980, where an utterance of a sentence like “It is raining” is conceived as receiving a truth-value only when the v...