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The present research examines the relationship between populist attitudes—that construe society as a struggle between the “corrupt elites” versus the “noble people”—and beliefs in unsubstantiated epistemic claims. We specifically sought to assess the often assumed link between conspiracy beliefs and populist attitudes; moreover, we examined if populist attitudes predict conspiracy beliefs in particular, or rather, credulity of unsubstantiated epistemic claims in general. Study 1 revealed that populist attitudes are robustly associated with conspiracy mentality in a large multination study, drawing samples from 13 European Union (EU) countries. Studies 2 and 3 revealed that besides conspiracy beliefs, populist attitudes also predict increased credulity of obscure and politically neutral news items (regardless of whether they were broadcasted by mainstream or alternative news sources), receptivity to bullshit statements, and supernatural beliefs. Furthermore, Study 3 revealed that these findings were mediated by increased faith in intuition. These studies support the notion of populist gullibility: An increased tendency of people who score high on populist attitudes to accept obscure or unsubstantiated epistemic claims as true, including nonpolitical ones.

In this thesis, I explore the issue of epistemic responsibility. I start by examining an argument against the use of critical thinking made by Michael Huemer. Huemer argues that critical thinking is not epistemically responsible, because it is not as truth conducive as credulity. Huemer instead argues that credulity should be the default approach taken by non-experts. After dissecting this argument, I go on to examine one of the critics to Huemer’s argument: David Kary. Kary argues that critical thinking and credulity are not mutually exclusive and can therefore be combined in an epistemically responsible way. Kary further argues that one must consider the social components of epistemic responsibility, and that when one does so, it is evident that truth conduciveness is not the only component of epistemic responsibility. I extend Huemer and Kary’s discussion by arguing that epistemic responsibility is even more complex. Epistemic superiority, equality and inferiority are fluid positions that change depending on context, and this must be considered when evaluating epistemic responsibility. The consequence of this approach is that a combination of critical thinking and credulity is the most responsible alternative. I end by arguing for the intellectual virtues and benefits of embracing this argument.

This essay explores the historical process by which the birth and expansion of information systems transformed the relationship between “faith” and “fact.” The existence of recurring forms of credulity and conversely denial—from holocaust denial to climate change denial—suggests that patterns of belief and disbelief will not be easily resolved either with fact-checking or with the regulation of the press.

In debates about trust and testimony, epistemologists have traditionally been divided into two groups: those who hold that accepting the testimony of other people should be a kind of credulity without evidence (anti- reductivism) and those who assert that we shouldn’t recognize any testimony as true or justified without appropriate evidence (reductivism). I will argue in favour of the evidentialist position about trust, or the stance that epistemically responsible trust is a matter of evidence, but also in favour of the thesis that the position assumed by anti- reductivists is not necessarily an anti- evidentialist posi tion. The crucial difference between anti-reductivism and reductivism does not pertain to the question of evidence, but to epistemic agency. Finally, I will argue against anti reductivism and in favour of agency evidentialism, wherein it is assumed that accepting testimony is a kind of agency where our (reflective) control is strong enough to ensure that our trust is responsible. The version of agency evidentialism which I here support presumes: (i) doxastic voluntarism, or the existence of intellectual freedom in the sense that we have to be capable of certain intellectual choices or decisions, and (ii) virtue epistemology, or the normative approach according to which the target of epistemic evaluation is an epistemic agent to whom we ascribe epistemic or intellectual virtues or vices (epistemic responsibility, epistemic conscientiousness or like.)

espanolEstas paginas proponen una comparacion entre Jean Bodin, demonologo frances del siglo XVI, y don Quijote como personaje de ficcion. Al igual que el heroe de la novela de Cervantes, Bodin da credibilidad a todo aquello que lee y, en consecuencia, con-vierte su propia disciplina, la demonologia, en una forma de novela que desdibuja de manera consciente las fronteras entre hecho y ficcion. Ambas formas de credulidad pueden compararse de manera productiva a las ideas de Michel de Montaigne acerca de la imaginacion y a su incursion filosofica en el dominio de lo posible. EnglishThis article proposes a comparison between the French Renaissance demonologist Jean Bodin and the fictional character Don Quijote. Like the hero of Cervantes’ novel, Bodin believes everything he reads. Consequently, Bodin makes his own discipline of demonology a species of romance that eagerly blurs the boundary of fact and fiction. This type of credulity can be usefully juxtaposed to Michel de Montaigne’s understanding of the imagination and to his more philosophical exploration of the realm of possibility.

I discuss the role of religious experience in Richard Swinburne's probabilistic case for theism. Swinburne draws on his principle of credulity to argue that, if in addition to other evidence we consider that many people have theistic religious experiences, theism comes out as more probable than not. However, on many plausible probability assignments for the relevant non-experiential evidence, the conditional probability of theism already converges towards 1. Moreover, an argument analogous to a general Bayesian argument against phenomenal conservatism suggests that, after we take account of evidence from religious experience, the probability of theism cannot be greater than the prior probability that the best rival hypothesis is false. I conclude that these observations are compatible with what Swinburne would call ‘weak rational belief’ in theism and that such weak belief can be strong enough for rational faith.

Uneasy Beginningsthe title of Michael Haneke's 2009 film Das weise Band in many ways draws attention to what the work is about. the metaphorically charged "white ribbon," which Haneke borrows from an early nineteenth-century text by Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger, is, in the words of the austere pastor who ties it in his children's hair or around their arms, intended to remind them in its white color of "Unschuld und reinheit" (see Heusinger 251). the implicit logic at play here is that the white ribbon will admonish the children-who are late for dinner and try to cover up their fault with lies-for having forfeited a putatively original purity through their delinquency. it is significant to grasp the peculiar logic of this white ribbon in its ambiguous connotation,1 as it signifies, on its surface, innocence and purity and, in the words of the pastor, is meant to help avoid "sunde, selbstsucht, Neid, Unkeuschheit, luge, faulheit." this didactic impetus, however, simultaneously and inevitably relies on the assertion or assumption of the bearer's degradedness in that it legitimizes itself as a result of his or her alleged im-purity, dis-ingenuousness, his or her regress-the very state that occasions the wearing of the white ribbon in the first place.to be sure, Haneke's film does not merely take up the didactic impetus of the white ribbon thematically but indeed translates it into the aesthetic registers of the cinematic medium. the questions of black and white and guilt and innocence enter the film-typographically-from the very beginning, or even from before the beginning. as part of the opening credits the film's title appears, in white block capitals, against a black backdrop. soon after, the subtitle emerges, again against the black backdrop, yet gradually rather than abruptly this time, and in small-font kurrent script-whose curved, swirling lines exhibit a ribbon-like quality-rather than in white block capitals: "Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte."2 if the pastor's world and the one epitomized by the white ribbon unmistakably seek to discern innocence and truthfulness (symbolized by the color white) from guilt and mendacity (symbolized by the color black), then this insistence on dichotomous structures finds itself both prefigured and tacitly unsettled already in the film's opening title. it is unambiguously called into question by the time seventyfive-year-old ernst Jacobi, who enacts the voice-over of the aged schoolteacher, begins this pensive tale, and does so in a manner reminiscent of Hegel's phrase of the "moderne Verlegenheit um den anfang" (51).ich weis nicht, ob die Geschichte, die ich ihnen erzahlen will, in allen Details der Wahrheit entspricht. Vieles darin weis ich nur vom Horensagen, und manches weis ich auch heute, nach so vielen Jahren, nicht zu entratseln, und auf unzahlige fragen gibt es keine antwort. aber dennoch glaube ich, dass ich die seltsamen ereignisse, die sich in unserem Dorf zugetragen haben, erzahlen muss, weil sie moglicher weise auf manche Vorgange in diesem land ein erhellendes licht werfen konnen.the "Vorgange" to which the narrator so ominously alludes here are, of course, the conflagrations of the second World War and the atrocious crimes of National socialism-crimes that, he intimates, are strangely foreshadowed by the events from 1913/1914 that he is about to relate. Precisely because of this purported parallel or even trajectory it appears all the more astounding that this narrator, who talks for almost two and a half hours (see also Williams 48), has so little to say about his own role in those "Vorgange in diesem land." What kind of witness are we dealing with here? Why this vagueness of his account, which relies on "hearsay" and disparages itself as "obscure" and "strange" as if it strained credulity? D oes this schoolteacher have something to cover up, to hide, or to deny? a wrongdoing, an ignominy, a disgrace, guilt? and what if Haneke's film does not simply present itself as an enclosed forum for the negotiation of guilt and innocence-to be studied from a secure distance-but if instead the viewer is meant to be put on the stand as well and confronted (metaleptically) with those same negotiated questions of guilt and innocence? …

Reid's principle of credulity may be interpreted as equivalent to a principle of charity, due to the nature of three beliefs it implies concerning the interlocutors, which are held by the person who attempts to acquire their language: (1) They are telling truth in the sense that they are saying what they really think, perceive, feel, believe; (2) they are veracious in the sense that what they say is objectively true; (3) they use language consistently. This interpretation relies on Reid's straightforward remarks on his principle of credulity and on his view of two related correspondences: One correspondence is between the principle of credulity and the principle of veracity. The other is between these two principles and the principles that create the ‘language of nature’ and guide us in our efforts to unravel it.

Where does entertaining (or promoting) conspiracy theories stand with respect to rational inquiry? According to one view, conspiracy theorists are open-minded skeptics, being careful not to accept uncritically common wisdom, exploring alternative explanations of events no matter how unlikely they might seem at first glance. Seen this way, they are akin to scientists attempting to explain the social world. On the other hand, they are also sometimes seen as overly credulous, believing everything they read on the Internet, say. In addition to conspiracy theorists and scientists, another significant form of explanation of the events of the world can be found in religious contexts, such as when a disaster is explained as being an “act of God.” By comparing conspiratorial thinking with scientific and religious forms of explanation, features of all three are brought into clearer focus. For example, anomalies and a commitment to naturalist explanation are seen as important elements of scientific explanation, although the details are less clear. This paper uses conspiracy theories as a lens through which to investigate rational or scientific inquiry. In addition, a better understanding of the scientific method as it might be applied in the study of events of interest to conspiracy theorists can help understand their epistemic virtues and vices.

Open-mindedness is generally regarded as an intellectual virtue because its exercise reliably leads to truth. However, some theorists have argued that open-mindedness’s truth-conduciveness is highly contingent, pointing out that it is either not truth-conducive at all under certain scenarios or no better than dogmatism or credulity in others. Given such shaky ties to truth, it would appear that the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is in jeopardy. In this paper, I propose to defend open-mindedness against these challenges. In particular, I show that the challenges are ill-founded because they misconstrue the nature of open-mindedness and fail to consider the requisite conditions of its application. With a proper understanding of open-mindedness and of its requirements, it is clear that recourse to it is indeed truth-conducive.

Suspicion toward reason is integral to much contemporary critical theory. The proximate source for this spirit of suspicion is undoubtedly Nietzsche’s genealogical unmasking of the will to truth as will to power. Robert Brandom summarizes this development as follows: Where the Enlightenment disenchanted the world through reason, genealogy is disillusionment with reason. Genealogy is the skeptical exacerbation of critique, the point at which it becomes suspicious of its own residual rationalism. The move from critique to genealogy marks the shift from the rational demarcation of reason’s limits to the skeptical destitution of reason’s authority. But reason is dialectical precisely to the extent that disenchantment presupposes an underlying trust in the capacities of conceptual rationality. Without such trust, the absolutization of genealogical suspicion lapses into metaphysical credulity toward an ultimately theological “other” of reason.

Can religious experience justify belief in God? We best approach this question by splitting it in two: (1) Do religious experiences give their subjects any justification for believing that there is a God of the kind they experience? And (2) Does testimony about such experiences provides any justification for believing that there is a God for those who are not the subject of the experience? The most popular affirmative answers trace back to the work of Richard Swinburne, who appeals to the Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony. Since then, development of his line of reasoning has gone in a number of distinct directions. Here I propose yet another development. I argue first that the Principle of Credulity is false on the grounds that it has several implausible commitments. I then offer a Phenomenal Conservative perspective on the epistemology of religious experience suggesting a categorically affirmative answer to (1) but a nuanced answer to (2) which allows the possibility of reasonable disagreement about religious experience.

��� In 1937 E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–73) published his now classic work of social anthropology, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Drawing on an impressive twenty months of fieldwork, it explored the supernatural culture of the Azande – an ethnic group from central Africa. As well as being highly detailed and evocative, what was so unusual about Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic was its sympathetic perspective. Rather than getting hung up on the illogicality or fallaciousness of ‘superstition’, EvansPritchard instead discerned in Azande beliefs about witches a degree of ‘intellectual consistency’. 1 By that he meant that their notions about the workings of witchcraft and the role of oracles were conceptually harmonious, forming something of an integrated and self-confirming belief system. From this perspective Azande witchcraft was notable more for its logic than for its mindless credulity. Intriguingly Evans-Pritchard reported that, during his immersive fieldwork, he too had actually come to think and act in terms of witchcraft. But despite the apparent ease with which he adopted this outlook (albeit temporarily), for Evans-Pritchard witchcraft beliefs were undoubtedly foreign, strange, and irrelevant to the culture of his homeland. Indeed, he thought his work would be ‘difficult for Europeans to understand’: ‘Witchcraft is a notion so foreign to us that it is hard for us to appreciate Zande convictions about its reality’. That may seem like a perfectly uncontroversial view. To many historians, at least, it has so seemed. Keith Thomas, for instance, in the foreword to his majestic Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), wrote something similar about ‘systems of belief ... which no longer enjoy much recognition today’. 2 And while several subsequent studies have shown how witchcraft belief was fairly widespread, on the plebeian level, in nineteenthcentury Britain, they have also reiterated its irrelevance to the twentieth century. Thus James Obelkevich proposed that by the close of the nineteenth century witchcraft belief had decayed ‘into mere luck’. 3 Even Owen Davies, who has done more than anyone to illuminate witchcraft’s nineteenth-century history, suggests that ‘the popular belief ... died out during the early decades of the twentieth century’. 4 Ronald Hutton, in his path-breaking study of the emergence of a very different type of ‘witchcraft’ – the peaceful nature religion of Wicca – agrees with Davies that ‘people ceased to fear

Motivated by a religiously-based defensive credulity, the accounts of apparitions recorded by Edmund Jones (1702–93) are heavily coloured by his personal religious beliefs. One of the best examples of this is his account of the Pwcca'r Trwyn, which differs widely from other versions of the tale. Through close investigation of Jones's telling, greater insight can be gained into his own folkloristics and the reluctance of later writers to use him as a source.

Though popular in the nineteenth century and widespread since, the elements of the hoax form can be traced to the origins of rhetorical theorizing, principally in the strategies of probability and counterprobability developed by the early orators and sophists. This article begins by defining features of the hoax as a textual event and then describes how hoaxes use traditional rhetorical techniques of both probability and improbability to transport viewers from credulity and acceptance to doubt and disbelief, demonstrating technical mastery over rhetorical conventions of the genre to mock their targets and to entertain and instruct their audience.

Practitioners of psychotherapy often find themselves in clinical situations that challenge their ability to maintain both empathy and “charitable skepticism” toward clients’ narratives. The author approaches this question of clinical credulity through a comparison of the religious philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Rosenzweig. Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments is read as advocating a necessary and provisional “leap of faith” when confronting such clinical aporias. This reading of Kierkegaard is then contrasted to Rosenzweig’s recommendations in his clinical allegory, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, which suggests a model of empathic reflection that balances affirmation with skepticism. The author concludes from this comparison that (a) the initial exploration of material provided by the psychotherapy client must proceed from a tentative “willful suspension of disbelief” on the part of the therapist and (b) this epistemology of faith must be tempered with the particular concept of “everyday philosophy” proposed by Rosenzweig.

Exploring the conspiratorial fictions surrounding the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, prince of Wales, in 1688, this article argues for the centrality of confessional language and feeling in the representation of the revolution of 1688-9. The warming-pan scandal and related fictions, I argue, use obscurity and a (perceived) lack of evidence as the starting-point for a kind of propaganda that relies heavily on the suspension of disbelief, ironically demanding readerly faith in a sceptical, satirical, iconoclastic and pseudo-scientific deconstruction of an invented plot which ridicules Catholics for their implicit faith.

The educational efficacy ascribed by the Theages to erotic intimacy and daemonic influence has troubled scholars, who generally consider it decadent, superstitious, and irrational. Similar concerns arise concerning the Academy of Polemo and Crates, which is the Theages' probable source. I argue that the dialogue signals how cooperative rational inquiry is compatible with erotics and daemonology through allusions to the Symposium and Theaetetus. Moreover, the most "outrageous" passage—the story of Aristides—is signposted as an ironic puzzle, not a straightforward representation of Socratic philosophizing. The way is thus cleared to revise our understanding of rationality in this dialogue and this period of the Academy. JoyaL opens his introduction to the Theages with the observa- tion that "scholars have made the question of the dialogue's authenticity almost the exclusive focus of their endeavours and have thereby been led to ignore what should be of primary importance, namely the detailed interpretation of the work from beginning to end." 1 Joyal's commentary of 2000, which was joined by Bailly's in 2004, effectively addresses this neglect by patiently tracing the movement of thought within the dialogue. Yet these commentators remain troubled by one of the elements which has always motivated debate about its authorship, namely, its conclusion. Here Socrates issues a double warning to his would-be pupil Theages: first, he himself possesses no learning, though he excels in his understand- ing of eros; second, the daimonion and "the god" bear responsibility for his pupils' progress, which appears to depend on physical proximity and bodily contact. It is this combination of erotics, divine intervention, and tactile influence which leads Pavlu to speak of "Wunderglauben an einen Zauberer Sokrates," drives Vlastos to athetize the Theages "as a monu- ment to the credulity to which some of Socrates' superstitious admirers

Mary Shelley, Theologian Sometimes a novel can be too successful for its own good. Odd as that claim might sound at first hearing, one need only recall Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Franz Kafka's The Trial, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to be convinced of its veracity. Despite their obvious differences, these otherwise dissimilar works have at least this in common: they are all novels that have become victims of their runaway fame. This victimization, so to speak, happens whenever a work of fiction speaks so much to its time that it takes on a life of its own: people believe they can absorb its lessons (or what the culture takes to be its lessons) without having to go through the bother of reading the original work at all. But Shelley's book became a hostage to its success twice over, for the popularity of most other iconic novels does not usually entail a distortion of the events recounted in their original narratives. Not so with Frankenstein. Within a mere five years of its publication, the plot--and therefore the point--of the novel was so thoroughly worked over that its real lessons became quite lost on those who have never read the book itself. Little reviewed upon its publication in 1818, it did not even manage to sell the initial 500 copies of its first edition. (1) This muffled reaction changed when, in the 1820s, several dramatized versions of the novel were put on the boards in England, the first and most influential of which gave us many of the extra plot-bits we know today: a lab assistant (here named Fritz), the surgeon's intimidating operating table, a massive electrical apparatus zapping the lifeless corpse, and so forth. (2) The Boris Karloff movie version of 1931 (directed by James Whale, with screenplay by Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh) only compounded the distortions: Now the "monster" is entirely mute; worse, he lives out his sad, brief life saddled with the brain of a recently deceased criminal of dim intelligence. To add to the muddle, he was brought to life in the movie by a middleaged (and apparently fully licensed) "doctor," and played to the hilt as cinema's first great example of that by-now standard Hollywood trope, the mad scientist. Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, however, was in fact a medical student from Geneva: in his mid-twenties, he was supposed to be studying medicine at Ingolstadt (as his family thought), but in fact began to skip classes after his first year in order to pursue his obsession with creating life in the laboratory. So popular and influential was this movie that nowadays most of the public knows the "monster" as a lurching, looming hulk barnacled with steel bolts in his neck, sporting stitches in his high forehead and topped off with that iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger haircut. Ironically, that same public now usually associates the Frankenstein surname not with his "mad" creator but with the creature--which is perhaps poetic justice, since Victor had categorically refused to bestow a name, any name, on his misbegotten handiwork. A fitting upshot, for now the creature has finally usurped his creator: Ask for a Frankenstein mask at a Halloween store, and a Boris Karloff mask is what you'll get. (3) The result of all these changes, early and late, has been to upend what makes the novel so enduringly topical, indeed so illuminatingly theological. To get across her essentially theological lesson, Shelley needed a creature who could speak back to his creator. Moreover-and this point cannot be stressed enough--in the novel the creature not only speaks but does so with an articulation and a grammatical fluency that could rival the complex, elegant repartee in one of Jane Austen's genteel parlors. Admittedly, the expedient by which Shelley has this new-made creature come to such conversational eloquence strains credulity: he picks up his aristocratic cadences from listening through a crack in the wall of a hut where a French nobleman and his son and daughter-in-law have taken refuge from the depredations of the French Revolution, and who are now living the life of rustic innocence in Bavaria. …

Os textos publicados por Lucien Febvre no entreguerras em defesa de uma história da ciência não mostram apenas o interesse dos Annales em prospectar e fundar novos campos de estudo, mas como, por meio desses textos, buscou-se estabelecer uma nova definição do que deveria ser a própria história. Paralelamente a esse esforço, Alexandre Koyré redigia seus primeiros estudos que seriam mais tarde considerados como marcos fundadores da moderna história do pensamento científico. Embora oriundos de fileiras intelectuais distintas, ambos formulavam o mesmo tipo de problema, voltavam-se contra os mesmos conceitos e opunham-se à mesma tradição historiográfica. No núcleo dessa problematização encontrava-se uma crítica ao modo como a temporalidade dessa história havia sido definida e a constatação de que ela precisava ser reformada para que a história não fosse falsificada. Que Febvre e Koyré chegassem à história das ciências via história das religiões ou do misticismo nos mostra que era preciso articular de uma nova maneira a relação entre credulidade e racionalidade e definir o tipo de temporalidade histórica que poderia albergar esse novo modo de articulá-las.

Michael Huemer (2005) argues that following the epistemic strategy of Critical Thinking—that is, thinking things through for oneself—leaves the agent epistemically either worse off or no better off than an alternative strategy of Credulity—that is, trusting the authorities. Therefore, Critical Thinking is not epistemically responsible. This article argues that Reasonable Credulity entails Critical Thinking, and since Reasonable Credulity is epistemically responsible, the Critical Thinking that it entails is epistemically responsible too.

The Principle of Credulity: ‘It is basic to human knowledge of the world that we believe things are as they seem to be in the absence of positive evidence to the contrary’‘Swinburne 1996: 133]. This underlies the Evidential Problem of Evil, which goes roughly like this: ‘There appears to be a lot of suffering, both animal and human, that does not result in an equal or greater utility. So there's probably some pointless suffering. As God's existence precludes pointless suffering, theism is implausible.’ CORNEA is the principle that observation O raises hypothesis H's probability only if O is more probable given H than it is given not-H. Theists sometimes maintain that apparently pointless suffering is just as likely given theism as atheism (I support this claim by appealing to a Lewisian account of the relevant counterfactuals). Given CORNEA, therefore, what we see of suffering does not make theism unlikely. I maintain that a consequence of so deploying CORNEA is that CORNEA and the Principle of Credulity ...

The contemporary explosion of information makes intellectual responsibility more needed than ever. The uncritical tend to believe too much that is unsubstantiated; the overcritical tend to believe too little that is true. A central problem for this paper is to formulate standards to guide an intellectually rigorous search for a mean between excessive credulity and indiscriminate skepticism. A related problem is to distinguish intellectual responsibility for what we believe from moral responsibility for what we do. A third problem is how to square intellectual responsibility in retaining our views with the realization that peers we respect disagree with us. Much of the paper is directed to articulating principles for dealing with such disagreements.

In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820) Percy Bysshe Shelley declares that his imagery has "been drawn from the operations of the human mind." Similarly in The Revolt of Islam (1818) Shelley attempts to translate the imagery of the "labouring brain," inherently incommunicable, into a language of sense (e.g., Canto I, stanzas 40-50). The narrative strategy in both works is to re-enact verbally the processes of perception and cognition, with particular attention to the physical pathology that causes aberration. While other poets of the period relish the natural world and seek to demonstrate a seemingly spontaneous and unencumbered access through the senses, Shelley exhibits the experiencing mind as subject to the influence of shock, diet, and other external circumstances. Shelley's narratives of revolution in Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam, not unlike those of William Blake in Jerusalem, trace an interaction and interdependence of internal and external events. Only rarely, however, did Blake conjure ghosts as instruments or agents. His psychological narrative is dominated by the Four Zoas, their Emanations and progeny. Shelley, by contrast, refers repeatedly to the obstinate trespasses of ghosts. In Shelley's vocabulary, "ghosts" refer most often to the thoughts, fantasies, memories that haunt the mind, rather than to spirits of the dead; and for Shelley the terrors of the mind have physical causes. When asked whether he believed in ghosts, Coleridge replied that he had "seen far too many to believe in them." Shelley might well have answered in the same terms. Ghosts flit through his best known poems. At the Castle Diodati on Lake Geneva, in June, 1816, occurred that well known episode in which Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Claire Claremont, and Mary Godwin Shelley amused themselves with ghost stories, giving rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). As a child Shelley delighted in telling ghost stories to his sisters, and the habit persisted when he grew up. Two gothie tales, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne were among his earliest publications (both in 1810). With his macabre fantasies he deliberately played on the credulity of Harriet Westbrook Shelley. On some occasions, Richard Holmes says, Shelley became so enraptured with his own ghost stories, that "the fantasies came near to hallucinations." (1) Certainly the two are intermixed in the crisis at Tanenyenrallt on January 19, 1812. On January 26, 1812, one week after the attack, Harriet Westbrook Shelley wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener to assure her that all was "quiet and tranquil." (2) Enclosed within her husband's own letter to Elizabeth, Harriet's note was written at the request of Shelley, who "has made me fill up this large-sheet." She must express her regret for sending an earlier account on the morning immediately following the event: "I have sent you a letter which I am afraid will add to your melancholy, yet it is true what I have said, and now I am quite angry that I sent it yet I was afraid you might hear the circumstance much more dreadful than it was." The reason for Harriet's apology, as this letter makes evident, was not to provide a less terrifying version of the assault, but rather to declare that Shelley's mental condition was not undermined. In this note Harriet made no mention of the physical attack by intruders on Shelley's person. Her reassurances were concerned rather with the severity of the "nervous attack" on his mental stability. In a postscript to Harriet's note, Shelley insisted on his recovery: "I am as Harriet can tell you quite recovered from the little nervous attack." But Harriet had not pronounced him "quite recovered." Instead, she declared that "He is much better than he has been for some time, and I hope as he gets stronger he will outgrow his nervous complaints." (3) How unstable was Shelley's psychological state? On January 16, 1812, just a few days before Shelley raised the alarm of a physical attack, he confessed to Elizabeth Hitchener that he had "been obliged by an accession of nervous attack to take a quantity of opium which I did very unwillingly or reluctantly. …

Like many interested in the history of ballet, I have read various things about the life and career of Vaslav Nijinsky. And I happen to accept much of what I have read. Among other things, I believe that he was born in Urkraine, had an affair with Sergei Diaghilev, starred in Petrushka, choreographed The Afternoon of a Faun, suffered from mental illness, and died in 1950. 1 accept all of this, and much else, solely on the basis of testimony, and most would think that I am warranted in doing so, indeed, even that I thereby know these things about Nijinsky. And it is clear that I stand no chance of knowing them otherwise.1 But I believe other things about him as well, among them, that he was a brilliant performergraceful, dynamicone of the greatest danseurs of Russian ballet. This too, I accept on nothing more than the word of others. And, again, it is clear that I could have no other basis for doing so. But are these beliefs similarly warranted? Do I know that Nijinsky was a great dancer through accepting the testimony of those who witnessed his performances, now so long ago? Many would hesitate to think so. In everyday life, we often exhibit a resistance to aesthetic testimony, quite unlike our instinctive credulity regarding nonaesthetic reports. And there is a formidable tradition in the philosophy of art that is deeply sympathetic to this attitude. Many philosophers flatly deny that we can learn from aesthetic testimony.2 And even those who resist this sweeping assessment still urge that we should exercise special caution in assessing such reports or conclude that we learn from them only very rarely.3 In short, the asymmetry thesis, or AT, that aesthetic testimony is epistemically inferior to nonaesthetic testimony, is firmly entrenched in both common sense and philosophical tradition. There is, however, an important distinction to be drawn among proponents of the thesis. On many defensible positions, aesthetic testimony fails to transmit knowledge, unlike nonaesthetic reports, simply because no one has any aesthetic knowledge to begin with. This includes expressivist views that deny aesthetic claims are truth-apt and the error theory, which maintains that aesthetic claims are all false.4 A modest sort of realism, which accepts that there are aesthetic truths but ultimately despairs the possibility of knowing them, similarly dismisses aesthetic testimony. AT is just an afterthought on these forms of aesthetic skepticism. More interestingly though, other philosophers embrace the possibility of aesthetic knowledge, but still urge that aesthetic testimony is uniquely problematic. Indeed, it is these philosophers who make a point to "single out" aesthetic reports as epistemically handicapped. In this article, I focus exclusively on their position. My aim is to defend aesthetic testimony in an important, but limited, way. Specifically, I suggest that if one accepts aesthetic knowledge via other means, it is difficult to maintain that there is any interesting epistemic contrast between aesthetic and nonaesthetic testimony. In short, if one rejects aesthetic skepticism, then AT seems unwarranted. I will not pretend to decide the much greater issue of whether aesthetic skepticism, in its various guises, can be rejected. To be sure, the ultimate fate of aesthetic testimony clearly hinges on this. The point I stress here is just that this is all it hinges on. I begin by examining the three asymmetrical positions currently found within the literature. I present the arguments given on their

In the 1950s, exotica was a genre of pop music that specialized in depicting imaginary exotic paradises and conventionalized natives. By the late 1960s, exotica pop had disappeared, but its tropes of temporal and spatial disjuncture persisted, structuring the music, visual art, and social theory of the utopian counterculture. While 1950s and 1960s kinds of exotica differ in their preferred imaginary destinations, both raise the question of what intermediate shades between belief and disbelief are demanded by aestheticized representations of human life. This essay theorizes exotica as a mode of representation governed by a peculiar mode of reception—one of willed credulity enabled by submission to its spectacle. What exotica demands is what intellectuals are least likely to give, though, and the peculiar pleasures of exotica spectacle are denigrated or rendered invisible in the hermeneutic regime.

Despite reservations expressed in the literature, there is a strong case in the context of schooling for favouring the view that students should engage in an assessment of their teachers for intellectual trustworthiness if credulity on the part of students is to be avoided. J. S. Mill's suggestion that the judgment of open-minded individuals can be trusted is explored and defended; and it is further argued that students are in a position to determine whether or not their teachers are open-minded by asking certain questions about their approach and manner.

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter of scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to “cognitive ethology” by philosophers can signal ignorance of the field to scientists who are more deeply immersed in the relevant literature. Understanding the variety of approaches to cognitive phenomena in animals is essential if such capacities are to form the foundation of scientifically-informed ethical reasoning about animals.

Collecting together commentary and critique on the Scottish play, this chapter presents varied discussions of the text and the theatrical productions. It discusses the works from the play of William Shakespeare by Johnson Samuel. The play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fictions, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action; but it has no nice discriminations of character, the events are too great to admit the influence of particular dispositions, and the course of the action necessarily determines the conduct of the agents. The danger of ambition is well described; and it know not whether it may not be said in defense of some parts which now seem improbable that in Shakespeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. The passions are directed to their true end. Lady Macbeth is merely detested; and though the courage of Macbeth preserves some esteem yet every reader rejoices at his fall.

In recent analytic philosophy of religion, one hotly debated topic is the veridicality of religious experience. In this paper, I briefly trace how the argument from religious experience comes into prominence in the twentieth century. This is due to the able defense of this argument by Richard Swinburne, William Alston, and Jerome Gellman among others. I explain the argument's intuitive force and why the stock objections to religious experience are not entirely convincing. I expound Swinburne's approach and his application of the Principle of Credulity to religious experience. Then I critically examine four major objections to Swinburne. I conclude that the argument from religious experiences is not likely to be conclusive but it should not be dismissed either.

I distinguish three evolutionary explanations of mental illness: first, breakdowns in evolved computational systems; second, evolved systems performing their evolutionary function in a novel environment; third, evolved personality structures. I concentrate on the second and third explanations, as these are distinctive of an evolutionary psychopathology, with progressively less credulity in the light of the empirical evidence. General morals are drawn for evolutionary psychiatry.

The text of Manfred is introduced with an epigraph consisting of Hamlet's famous words: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'1 Duncan Wu annotates this with the remark that the epigraph underlines Byron's belief in the supernatural and metaphysical at the time of composing the dramatic poem.2 This, however, is to take Byron at his word-an unwise thing to do in the case of a man who was renowned for his bams. If by 'belief in the metaphysical' is meant belief in God and at least a serious interest in the theory of the One Life, this part of Wu's note is unexceptionable, since two of the Alpine stanzas in the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (stanzas 89 and 90) show such a belief and such an interest. But if 'Byron's belief in the supernatural' means a belief in such beings as the spirits, the Witch, Nemesis and Arimanes, who appear in Manfred, one has to murmur that Byron wrote during the Regency and not in the reign of James VI. The Enlightenment had banished demonology. Belief in the supernatural had degenerated to such an extent that Burns could make it the subject of an elaborate joke in 'Tam O'Shanter.' Surely, a rational reader thinks, Tam's vision of witches dancing in a haunted church, to bagpipe music played by the devil in the shape of a black dog, is the hallucination of a drunken man. But the moral of the poem warns us, when tempted by drink or cutty sarks, to remember Tam's mare, whose tail was pulled off by the foremost witch in pursuit of the frightened hero. Go to the stable and you will see that the mare has lost her tail. How could that have happened if this was not a 'tale o' truth'?3 In the 1817 edition of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' Coleridge included a marginal gloss supposed to have been written by a seventeenth-century demonologist. This complicates our interpretation of the poem, and has inclined some readers to think that they should willingly suspend their disbelief in supernatural spirits. But readers of the nineteenth century and later should give no more credence to the words of a demonologist than to those of a superstitious sailor of the sixteenth century. In recent years psychological explanations have been offered of the Mariner's supposed supernatural experiences. Richard Matlak has pointed out that according to the Mariner's own narrative he alone saw the spectre-bark, even though he drew his shipmates' attention to it and he says it came alongside.4 Besides having this hallucination, the Mariner converts dreams into supposed facts. He first heard of a submarine spirit when his shipmates recounted their dreams (131-34), but later he narrates that that spirit propelled the ship from a depth of nine fathoms, as though this was a fact (377-80). By making this claim about something of which he can have no knowledge, the Mariner casts doubt on the rest of his tale. He says of his dead shipmates, lying on a rotting deck, 'Nor rot nor reek did they' (254).5 This can only mean that they were not actually dead. They had probably collapsed through dehydration, and were revived by the rainstorm, when the superstitious Mariner thought that their bodies were animated by 'a troop of spirits blest' (349). Indeed he later describes the supposedly dead men standing together on the deck (433-35). This inclines a rational reader to think that the seraphband, who are said to have stood on the corpses and waved their hands (488-95), must have been another hallucination. But the seraphic signals were also seen by the Pilot and the Hermit in the skiff (523-27), and it would be over-ingenious to argue that the shipmates themselves must have been signalling with lights, since the Hermit says, 'they answered not our cheer!' (528). So a rational interpretation of the uncanny appearances in the poem is confounded even as a supernatural interpretation is undermined. Coleridge does in a serious way what Burns does in a comic one: both poets in their masterpieces play with our uncertainty about the extent of the credulity that we should allow ourselves in reading poems of the supernatural. …

The best way to get a clear view of questions about truth--in the law or anywhere else--is to start, not with debates over "modernism" versus "post-modernism," and the whole dubious history of ideas they presuppose, but with a few simple distinctions. Truth is the property of being true, what it is to be true. Of the umpteen competing philosophical theories of truth, the most plausible are, in intent or in effect, generalizations of the Aristotelian Insight that "to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true." (1) These theories explain truth without reference to what you or I or anyone believes, without reference to culture, paradigm, or perspective. Some of them, the various versions of the correspondence theory, turn the emphatic adverb for which we reach when we say that p is true just in case actually, really, in fact, p, into serious metaphysics, construing truth as a relation, structural or conventional, of propositions or statements to facts or reality. (2) Others, such as Tarski's semantic theory, (3) Ramsey's "redundancy" theory, (4) and the contemporary deflationist, minimalist, disquotationalist, and prosententialist theories that are their descendants, (5) don't require such an elaborate ontological apparatus. Truths are the many and various propositions, beliefs, etc., which are true, including: particular empirical claims, scientific theories, historical propositions, mathematical theorems, logical principles, textual interpretations, statements about what a person believes or wants or intends, about social roles and rules, etc. To say that a claim is true is not to say that anyone, or everyone, believes it, but that things are as it says. However, some claims are such that the relevant things--a person's beliefs or intentions, a legal or grammatical rule--depend, in one way or another, on us; and some are such that it makes sense to ascribe a truth-value only relative to this or that community or social practice. Moreover, not every sentence, not even every declarative sentence, manages to express something true or false; some, for instance, are too indeterminate in meaning to have a truth-value. The effect of scare quotes is to turn an expression meaning "X" into an expression meaning "so-called 'X'." So scare-quotes "troth," as distinct from truth, is what is taken to be truth; and scare-quotes "truths," as distinct from truths, are claims, propositions, or beliefs, which are taken to be truths--many of which are not really troths at all. We humans, after all, are thoroughly fallible creatures. Even with the best will in the world, finding out the truth can be hard work; and we are often willing, even eager, to take pains to avoid discovering, or to cover up, unpalatable truths. The rhetoric of truth, moreover, can be used in nefarious ways. Hence an important source of the idea that truth is merely a rhetorical or political concept: the seductive, but crashingly invalid, argument I call the "Passes-for Fallacy." (6) What passes for truth, the argument goes, is often no such thing, but only what the powerful have managed to get accepted as such; therefore the concept of truth is nothing but ideological humbug. Stated plainly, this is not only obviously invalid, but also in obvious danger of undermining itself. If, however, you don't distinguish truth from scare-quotes "truth," or troths from scare-quotes "truths," it can seem irresistible. Nowadays, it seems, the Passes-for Fallacy is ubiquitous. Perhaps it is rooted in the philosophies of Marx and Freud, in the idea of false consciousness and the "hermeneutics of suspicion." (7) It is enabled by regimes of propaganda and, in our times, by the overwhelming flood of information, and misinformation, which promotes first credulity and then, as people realize they have been fooled, cynicism. For when it becomes notorious that what are presented as truths are not really truths at all--that Pravda is full of lies and propaganda, that the scientific breakthrough or miracle drag prematurely trumpeted in the press was no such thing--people become increasingly distrustful of truth-claims, increasingly reluctant to speak of truth without the precaution of neutralizing quotation marks; until eventually, they lose confidence in the very idea of truth, and formerly precautionary scare-quotes cease to warn and begin to scoff: "'Truth? …

18th-century French churchmen are too easily imagined after the model of Voltaire's inventions, but not all apologists were so credulous. Guillaume Male¬ ville is particularly interesting because of his hesitations ; he needed well-attested miracles to guarantee revelation, because both defied his credulity. Problems raised by the Biblical text were combined with doubts and reservations about the difference between the values of the Pentateuch and those of contemporaries, as about certain Pentateuch laws. His doubts are here compared to passages in Calmet and Houtteville, who remark that many elements of Catholic theology are absurd. All three apologists thought they had triumphed over the doubts and adsurdities they had evoked but these doubts and absurdities, which parallel the anti-Catholic polemics of several Philosophes and clandestine authors, illustrate an unexpected enlightened dimension in their undoubted orthodoxy., Schwarzbach Bertram Eugene. Guillaume Maleville et la Bible. Homme d'Église et hommes des Lumières. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°35, 2003. L'épicurisme des Lumières, sous la direction de Anne Deneys-Tunney et Pierre-François Moreau. pp. 419-438.

The assumption that we largely lack reasons for accepting testimony has dominated its epistemology. Given the further assumption that whatever reasons we do have are insufficient to justify our testimonial beliefs, many conclude that any account of testimonial knowledge must allow credulity to be justified. In this paper I argue that both of these assumptions are false. Our responses to testimony are guided by our background beliefs as to the testimony as a type, the testimonial situation, the testifier's character and the truth of the proposition testified to. These beliefs provide reasons for our responses. Thus, we usually do have reasons, in the sense of propositions believed, for accepting testimony and these reasons can provide evidence for the testimonial beliefs we form.

In James Boswell's Life of Johnson, for May 1776, the following exchange appears, important for the light it sheds on Johnson's attitude toward literary deception: "We spoke of Chatterton. BOSWELL. 'Has not, Sir, his poetry a claim on our esteem for its poetical spark?' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; such claim as he had on our esteem he has forfeited through his imposture, and his poetical spark is extinguished by his disregard for truth. Chatterton's poetry can no more be beautiful than Ossian's; both are calculated to deceive credulity. There is no pleasing deception, for no man will willingly be deceived. No, Sir; his productions merit no commendation."' This passage is illuminating for several reasons: first, it suggests that Johnson thought of Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson as engaged in the same fraudulent enterprise; second, it shows the degree to which Johnson's aesthetics are bound up in his epistemology. But the most noteworthy thing about the passage is that Johnson never said it, nor did Boswell ever record it-I created it out of whole cloth for this essay. Mine is, I think, a reasonable counterfeit. The diction and the syntax are not a bad approximation of Johnsonese, or at least Boswell's version of it. Its success, however, depends not on any intrinsic merits it may have, but on the presumption of honesty and integrity that readers of scholarly essays implicitly extend to their authors. Readers appreciate the chance to verify the au