Nicholas Shackel | Cardiff University (original) (raw)
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Papers by Nicholas Shackel
European journal for philosophy of science, Jun 1, 2022
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement
In this chapter I show how challenges to our ability to tame the uncertainty of a pandemic leaves... more In this chapter I show how challenges to our ability to tame the uncertainty of a pandemic leaves us vulnerable to uncertainty phobia. This is because, contrary to what we might hope, not all the uncertainty that matters can be tamed by our knowledge of the relevant probabilities. Unrelievable wild uncertainty is a hard burden to bear, especially so when we must act in the face of it. We are tempted to retreat into uncertainty phobia, leading to fixed definite opinions precisely when acting on sound judgement requires our opinions to be hedged and mobile. Coping with a pandemic requires us to bear the burden rather than give in to temptation: it requires us to practise the virtue of epistemic forbearance.
Revue Roumaine De Philosophie, 2024
Brentano never published on Bertrand’s paradox but claimed to have a solution. Adrian Maître has ... more Brentano never published on Bertrand’s paradox but claimed to have a solution. Adrian Maître has recovered from the Franz Brentano Archive Brentano’s remarks on his solution. They do not give us a worked demonstration of his solution but only an incomplete and in places obscure justification of it. Here I attempt to identify his solution, to explain what seem to me the clearly discernible parts of his justification and to discuss the extent to which the justification succeeds in the light of current work on Bertrand’s paradox.
Revue roumaine de philosophie 68, 2024
This issue of the Revue examines some central themes in Mill's philosophy, his relationship with ... more This issue of the Revue examines some central themes in Mill's philosophy, his relationship with Auguste Comte, and how Mill's thought was received in the 19th century. Also included and analyzed is a manuscript by Brentano on Bertrand's paradox.
Philosophical Books, 2003
Spirituality, Religiousness and Health, 2019
We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific stud... more We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific study of possible influences of religious belief on the experience of physical pain. We start by attempting to identify a notion of religious belief that might enter into interesting psychological generalizations involving both religious belief and pain. We argue that it may be useful to think of religious belief as a complex dispositional property that relates believers to a sufficiently thick belief system that encompasses both cognitive and non-cognitive elements. Such a conception of religious belief is more likely to correlate with psychological properties of believers that are both sufficiently shared and sufficiently unique to distinguish their psychology from believers in another religion or from non-believers. If the dispositional psychological property that constitutes religious belief does influence pain, then our analysis suggests that it doesn't do so directly but rather through one of its occurrent manifestations. We offer a taxonomy of the different ways in which occurrent states of belief or experience may interact with physical pain, and we try to identify those that are more interesting or promising. We then proceed to employ the conceptual framework we developed to some of the existing evidence about the neural and psychological correlates of religious belief and experience, and about the cognitive modulation of physical pain. Finally we turn to analyse two experiments that directly investigated the relation between religious belief and pain. We draw attention to the limitations of existing evidence and end by suggesting directions for future conceptual and empirical inquiry.
Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
Philosophical Studies, 2013
Pain, Jan 15, 2008
Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is u... more Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it. Recent findings on emotion regulation support a role for the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a region also important for driving top-down pain inhibitory circuits. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in practicing Catholics and avowed atheists and agnostics during painful stimulation, here we show the existence of a context-dependent form of analgesia that was triggered by the presentation of an image with a religious content but not by the presentation of a non-religious image. As confirmed by behavioral data, contemplation of the religious image enabled the religious ...
European journal for philosophy of science, Jun 1, 2022
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement
In this chapter I show how challenges to our ability to tame the uncertainty of a pandemic leaves... more In this chapter I show how challenges to our ability to tame the uncertainty of a pandemic leaves us vulnerable to uncertainty phobia. This is because, contrary to what we might hope, not all the uncertainty that matters can be tamed by our knowledge of the relevant probabilities. Unrelievable wild uncertainty is a hard burden to bear, especially so when we must act in the face of it. We are tempted to retreat into uncertainty phobia, leading to fixed definite opinions precisely when acting on sound judgement requires our opinions to be hedged and mobile. Coping with a pandemic requires us to bear the burden rather than give in to temptation: it requires us to practise the virtue of epistemic forbearance.
Revue Roumaine De Philosophie, 2024
Brentano never published on Bertrand’s paradox but claimed to have a solution. Adrian Maître has ... more Brentano never published on Bertrand’s paradox but claimed to have a solution. Adrian Maître has recovered from the Franz Brentano Archive Brentano’s remarks on his solution. They do not give us a worked demonstration of his solution but only an incomplete and in places obscure justification of it. Here I attempt to identify his solution, to explain what seem to me the clearly discernible parts of his justification and to discuss the extent to which the justification succeeds in the light of current work on Bertrand’s paradox.
Revue roumaine de philosophie 68, 2024
This issue of the Revue examines some central themes in Mill's philosophy, his relationship with ... more This issue of the Revue examines some central themes in Mill's philosophy, his relationship with Auguste Comte, and how Mill's thought was received in the 19th century. Also included and analyzed is a manuscript by Brentano on Bertrand's paradox.
Philosophical Books, 2003
Spirituality, Religiousness and Health, 2019
We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific stud... more We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific study of possible influences of religious belief on the experience of physical pain. We start by attempting to identify a notion of religious belief that might enter into interesting psychological generalizations involving both religious belief and pain. We argue that it may be useful to think of religious belief as a complex dispositional property that relates believers to a sufficiently thick belief system that encompasses both cognitive and non-cognitive elements. Such a conception of religious belief is more likely to correlate with psychological properties of believers that are both sufficiently shared and sufficiently unique to distinguish their psychology from believers in another religion or from non-believers. If the dispositional psychological property that constitutes religious belief does influence pain, then our analysis suggests that it doesn't do so directly but rather through one of its occurrent manifestations. We offer a taxonomy of the different ways in which occurrent states of belief or experience may interact with physical pain, and we try to identify those that are more interesting or promising. We then proceed to employ the conceptual framework we developed to some of the existing evidence about the neural and psychological correlates of religious belief and experience, and about the cognitive modulation of physical pain. Finally we turn to analyse two experiments that directly investigated the relation between religious belief and pain. We draw attention to the limitations of existing evidence and end by suggesting directions for future conceptual and empirical inquiry.
Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
Philosophical Studies, 2013
Pain, Jan 15, 2008
Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is u... more Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it. Recent findings on emotion regulation support a role for the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a region also important for driving top-down pain inhibitory circuits. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in practicing Catholics and avowed atheists and agnostics during painful stimulation, here we show the existence of a context-dependent form of analgesia that was triggered by the presentation of an image with a religious content but not by the presentation of a non-religious image. As confirmed by behavioral data, contemplation of the religious image enabled the religious ...
Routledge, 2024
Events between which we have no epistemic reason to discriminate have equal epistemic probabiliti... more Events between which we have no epistemic reason to discriminate have equal epistemic probabilities. Bertrand’s chord paradox, however, appears to show this to be false, and thereby poses a general threat to probabilities for continuum sized state spaces. Articulating the nature of such spaces involves some deep mathematics and that is perhaps why the recent literature on Bertrand’s Paradox has been almost entirely from mathematicians and physicists, who have often deployed elegant mathematics of considerable sophistication. At the same time, the philosophy of probability has been left out. In particular, left out entirely are the philosophical ground of the principle of indifference, the nature of the principle itself, the stringent constraint this places on the mathematical representation of the principle needed for its application to continuum sized event spaces, and what these entail for rigour in developing the paradox itself. This book puts the philosophy and its entailments back in and in so doing casts a new light on the paradox, giving original analyses of the paradox, its possible solutions, the source of the paradox, the philosophical errors we make in attempting to solve it and what the paradox proves for the philosophy of probability. The book finishes with the author’s proposed solution—a solution in the spirit of Bertrand’s, indeed—in which an epistemic principle more general than the principle of indifference offers a principled restriction of the domain of the principle of indifference.