This article presents a review of Hard to Believe, a compelling documentary reporting the forced organ procurement and death of Chinese prisoners of conscience. The documentary is targeted to ignite political and public pressure to stop these practices that are thought to be motivated by financial and political gain. Narrated by journalist and author Ethan Gutmann, the documentary pricks at the...

Is there a difference between believing and merely understanding an idea?Descartes thought so. He considered the acceptance and rejection of an idea to be alternative outcomes of an effortful assessment process that occurs subsequent to the automatic comprehension of that idea. This article examined Spinoza's alternative suggestion that (a) the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic com...

Editor's Note: These short reviews of a recent paper in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to mimic the journal clubs that exist in your own departments or institutions. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see

In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in game...

Can we believe what we read? As practitioners and researchers we trust in good faith that the information presented within our professional journals is a true and accurate representation of the authors' work; be it a substantive review of the literature on a particular area, or the use of previous research to support the clinical findings of an interesting case. As authors, we are responsible f...

I argue that proper assertion requires belief. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued otherwise. Here I respond to Lackey’s argument and provide positive evidence that permissible assertion does require belief. The positive evidence takes the form of an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding the give and take of assertion. Looming large in the background of the discussion is whe...

When I came to UCSD, a professor asked me how I could be a professing intellectual and still be a Christian. The topic came up a few weeks back as well. So I thought I would collect my thoughts about reasons that I personally find helpful when considering whether Christianity makes sense. Note that I do not accept the definition that faith is "belief without reason". Instead I prefer the defini...

How should we understand reasons-based knowledge? According to the counterfactual or modal account of conclusive reasons, famously defended by Dretske, R is conclusive for P just in case [R would not be the case unless P were the case]. I argue that while knowing is plausibly related to having conclusive reasons to believe, having such reasons cannot be understood in terms of the obtaining of t...