Allen Stairs

Philosophy prof; views tweeted are mine and not UMD's. Yup, I'm a liberal. Nope, I don't care whether you're an atheist.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@DanMesse If you don't know it already, there is a wonderful cover of Talk to Me of Mendico by Rufus and Martha Wainright and Jane McGarrigle. It's on that service that starts with a Y and ends with an E.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@DanMesse Gorgeous album. And in case you don't know it...
https://t.co/d9hsJy8MUA

[Potato Queen 👑 @potato_heiress]

Unpopular COVID take🧵: Just putting this out there—but if you’re not masking in public spaces anymore, your vulnerable friends/family/coworkers have clocked that you’re not a safe person and they’ll never forget it.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

Welcome to the Elon Musk age on Twitter. Twitter needs Musk like Metamucil needs Kaopectate.

[Keith Frankish @keithfrankish]

You have been warned

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

Trying to get some rough data. The issue isn't what you think about God. It's about how people understand the word "faith." If you have 90 seconds, I'd appreciate your (anonymous) answers to two simple multiple choice Qs.
https://t.co/GlRzk5H7Ow

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@boutela @keith_wilson The context is a discussion of non-doxastic faith, as it's called: supposed faith without belief, but with a weaker attitude like acceptance.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

I need an umbrella word for propositional attitudes like belief that, assumption that, suspicion that... I mean propositional attitudes with a mind-to-world direction of fit and that can be mistaken. Extra points if constructions like "___ that P" work.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@boutela @keith_wilson That's the kind of thing that I mean, but it's the turn of phrase I'm after. Also, for my purpose, "doxastic" suggests actual belief, as opposed to a weaker attitude too strongly.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@SilveryCurls Possibly. But "premise that" will grate on some people's grammatical sensibilities. Also, it may come across as too hypothetical -- just as "posit that" would.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@MicahTillman But anyway... it would be interesting for someone to fine-grain this. Not all boomers had the same musical tastes. Did what folks like me listened to correlated with how we ended up politically?

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@MicahTillman Some boomers (like me...) would rather sit in their own excrement than vote for Trump.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@_JamieWhyte @davidpapineau That's a possible kind of case, though not what I have in mind. Imagine, for example, people A and B. A's credence for X is >.5, B's is <.5 but their evidence is the same. My instinct: it could be that neither is irrational.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

Theory of knowledge types: A naive question. Suppose X believes that P and Y believes that not-P, but they have the same evidence, data, whatnot. Could they both be within their epistemic rights? (Warranted???)

FWIW, my instinct is to say yes.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@rascality Not to mention that there's a good deal of bullshit in the justification given for Yang's proposed third party. It plays into the dumbest kind of "both sides"ism

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@davidpapineau Thanks for that. Is there a published version of the talk?

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

@SilveryCurls Sounds plausible to me. I'm trying to find out what epistemologists have had to say, not knowing this particular literature.

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

The usual story is that we can't decide to believe things, though we might be able to decide to accept them. What about disbelief? Has anyone talked about deciding _not_ to believe? (Full disclosure: my instinct is that it's possible.)

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

T. S. Eliot apparently said somewhere that he regarded Christianity as the least false of the available options. Leave aside whether he was right; not my issue. I need to track down the reference. Can anyone help?

Ta ever so much!

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

Sometimes the Atlantic crossword is too clever by half

[Allen Stairs @AllenStairs]

There's a ton of literature on assertion. Is there any on affirmation? (Reading something that uses both, assumes that they aren't synonyms, and says almost nothing about what the difference might be.)