Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Robert van Rooij, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, at the University of Amsterdam. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. As it happens, nearly everything we say is imprecise. For example, when I indicate where I want you to stand while posing for a photo, I don’t give exact coordinates; I just point with my finger. When I tell you my friend Janine is really tall, I don’t specify her height right down to the last millimeter. Would six feet count as tall? Probably. How about 5'11"? Or 5'10"? 5'9"? The closer we get to the middle of the boundary between people who are tall and people who aren’t, the more of a challenge it is to say, because the boundary is blurry. And when I tell you that my sixth grade music teacher was bald, it isn’t clear exactly how much hair I’m saying he had. Maybe he had absolutely no hair, or maybe he had a little bit. In any event, he didn’t have much. But how much does it take to be ‘much’? What are we to make of the fact that we can’t give an exact answer to that question? ...

For those of you who’d like to read more about the issues we discussed with Martha Nussbaum in Episode 35, we recommend you check out her recent book, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Belknap Press, 2011). The book provides a wonderful and concise presentation of the capabilities approach to human development, and contains an excellent bibliography. Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we speak with Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. You can listen to our conversation here. What do we mean when we talk about nations being more or less developed? Is it simply a matter of being financially better-off? If not, then what would be a better measure of how well a country is doing? ...

If you’d like to read up on the epistemology of moral disagreement, you can have a look at: Adam Elga, ‘Reflection and Disagreement’ Tom Kelly, “Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence” Those two articles set the stage for the following article by Kieran Setiya: Kieran Setiya, “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?” In addition, keep your eye open for his forthcoming monograph: Kieran Setiya, Knowing Right From Wrong Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we’re joined by Kieran Setiya, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Disagreement in ethical matters is a common enough phenomenon. Yet, what exactly is the appropriate way to respond when one is confronted with it in one’s own life? Sometimes such disputes can be resolved easily enough—perhaps there is a piece of missing information or an error in reasoning that can simply be pointed out by one interlocutor to the other. ...

If you’re interested in reading about some of the issues that came up during our conversation with Daniel Sutherland, you can check out these articles: Paul Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 19, (Nov. 8, 1973), pp. 661-679. W.D. Hart, “Benacerraf’s Dilemma”, CRÍTICA, Vol. XXIII, No. 68 (August 1991): 87-10 Unfortunately, you need online access to JSTOR to view those papers. Sorry we weren’t able to provide freely available background readings this time! If you don’t have online access to JSTOR, you can look them up in your nearest university library. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we’re joined by Daniel Sutherland, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. In this technological age, most of our day-to-day tasks involve numbers and arithmetic. And yet, it can be difficult to say what a number is. Consider the number 3. In the room where I’m sitting, there are three bottles of detergent. But what about the number three itself? Where is that? On the shelf, where the bottles themselves are? Is the number three itself sitting here in the room, next to me? That seems like kind of a strange thing to say. So maybe it isn’t anywhere. But how could there be something that isn’t anywhere? Isn’t everything in our lives located somewhere? Sheesh. Ok, I give up. I guess there isn’t any such thing as the number three. But wait a minute–if numbers aren’t real, then what exactly was I doing all those years in math class?! It certainly seemed like I was hard at work, solving problems that ought to be taken seriously. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Jennifer Lockhart, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University and recent graduate of the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with her. You’re at a party. Some guy is dominating the conversation, holding forth loudly and at great length about the importance of politeness. “Politeness,” he says as he cuts off another guest’s attempt to get a word in, “is all about consideration for others. It’s about the little things, like making eye-contact,” he adds, failing to make eye contact. As you look for an opportunity to get away, you ask yourself: “What is wrong with this guy?” ...

Anyone who’s curious to learn more about the fallacies of inductive reasoning covered in our last episode can take a look at the following: On the base rate fallacy, see Jonathan J. Koehle’s “The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges” On the conjunction fallacy, see Vincenzo Crupi, Branden Fitelson, and Katya Tentori’s “Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacy” Professor Fitelson has also kindly shared the following lecture notes, closely related to his conversation with us, and which include a very useful bibliography. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, Branden Fitelson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, joins us to discuss reasoning fallacies. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Imagine that you are worried that you have a rare disease for which there is a reliable test. If you take this test and it returns a positive result, how certain should you be that you have the disease? ...