Contrary to what many doctors apparently assume, there is overwhelming evidence (cf. here and here) that hydranencephalic children, who lack a cerebral cortex, are creature conscious in a robust sense. That is, they have a sleep-wake cycle, they respond appropriately to some features of stimuli, and they express emotions and preferences. …
Justin Sytsma and I (Pittsburgh, HPS) are surveying people’s intuitions about mental states. We would appreciate if the readers of this blog took part in this survey. We ask participants to complete a 5-minute questionnaire and we ask a few biographic questions. The questionnaire is entirely anonymous and your response …
Josh Dever is concerned that philosophers don’t cite Ph.D. dissertations enough. To try to counter that, he has created a webpage with links to some philosophy dissertations. (Link couresy of Brandon Towl.)
Price announcement. Some comments on it. (Courtesy of Zvi Biener.)
Here.
In response to his message quoted below, I asked John Roberts if we would expand on why he thinks that even allowing the observability of singular causal facts, most leading anti-Humean accounts of laws remain incompatible with Earman and Roberts’ argument. At any rate, John Roberts wrote as follows (it would be interesting to know what supporters of anti-Humeanism about laws have to say about it):
In a previous post, I argued that Earman and Roberts, in their 2005 PPR articles on Humean Supervenience (HS) about laws of nature, were implicitly relying on the view that nomic facts (such as singular causal facts) are unobservable. There followed an interesting discussion. But the question that none of us could answer was, what do Earman and Roberts think about HS vis a vis the observability of nomic facts?
John Roberts wrote me as follows (reproduced by permission):
