Journal ArticleDOI
Moral Facts and Best Explanations
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In this article, the authors make the case that moral realism requires that moral facts really will figure in the best explanatory picture of the world, and that moral properties are real properties.Abstract:
Do moral properties figure in the best explanatory account of the world? According to a popular realist argument, if they do, then they earn their ontological rights, for only properties that figure in the best explanation of experience are real properties. Although this realist strategy has been widely influential—not just in metaethics, but also in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science—no one has actually made the case that moral realism requires: namely, that moral facts really will figure in the best explanatory picture of the world. This issue may have been neglected in part because the influential dialectic on moral explanations between philosophers Gilbert Harman and Nicholas Sturgeon has focused debate on whether moral facts figure in relevant explanations. Yet as others have noted, explanatory relevance is irrelevant when it comes to realism: after all, according to the popular realist argument, it is inference to the best explanation of experience that is supposed to confer ontological rights. I propose to ask, then, the relevant question about moral explanations: should we think that moral properties will figure in the best explanatory account of the world?read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Problematic Value of Mathematical Models of Evidence
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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I
TL;DR: A genetical mathematical model is described which allows for interactions between relatives on one another's fitness and a quantity is found which incorporates the maximizing property of Darwinian fitness, named “inclusive fitness”.
Book
Childhood and Society
TL;DR: Erikson's Childhood and Society as discussed by the authors deals with the relationship between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation.
Book
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
TL;DR: In this paper, secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles are presented. But the authors focus on the secondary sexual characteristics of fishes and amphibians rather than the primary sexual characters.
Journal Article
The descent of man and selection in relation to sex: documento
TL;DR: Part I. Sexual Selection (continued): Secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles, and secondarySexual characters of birds.
Book
Civilization and Its Discontents
TL;DR: In this article, Freud worked on what became the seminal volume of twentieth-century thought, "Structural Theory of Mind", which stands as a brilliant summary of the views on culture from a psychoanalytic perspective that he had been developing since the turn of the century.