Burkay Ozturk

Virtually all prominent critics of the Pessimistic Induction have so far assumed that in order to defeat the argument, one must show that there is a degree of continuity in the history of science at the level of theory. In my dissertation I challenge this assumption and argue for three theses: (I) The assumption in question can lend support to at best a very impoverished form of optimism about only bits and pieces of our best scientific theories is warranted. (II) A more promising strategy is possible: The Pessimistic Induction can be defeated if we can show that the evidence today's scientific community has for our best theories is qualitatively and quantitatively superior to the evidence past scientists had for their best theories. (III) The evidence today's scientific community has for some of our best theories (such as the Fermi-Landau Liquid theory) is unequivocally better than its historical predecessors, while there is no observable unequivocal improvement as far as the evidence we have for the theories in behavioral and medical sciences is concerned.

Virtually all prominent critics of the Pessimistic Induction have so far assumed that in order to defeat the argument, one must show that there is a degree of continuity in the history of science at the level of theory. In my dissertation I challenge this assumption and argue for three theses: (I) The assumption in question can lend support to at best a very impoverished form of optimism about only bits and pieces of our best scientific theories is warranted. (II) A more promising strategy is possible: The Pessimistic Induction can be defeated if we can show that the evidence today's scientific community has for our best theories is qualitatively and quantitatively superior to the evidence past scientists had for their best theories. (III) The evidence today's scientific community has for some of our best theories (such as the Fermi-Landau Liquid theory) is unequivocally better than its historical predecessors.

The first-person authority view (FPA) is the current dominant view about what someone’s gender is. According to FPA the person has authority over her own gender identity; her sincere self-identification trumps the opinions of others. There are two versions of FPA: epistemic and ethical. Both versions try to explain why a person has authority over her own gender identity. But both have problems. Epistemic FPA attributes to the self-identifier an unrealistic degree of doxastic reliability. Ethical FPA implies the existence of an unreasonably strong and unqualified obligation on the part of others not to reject the person’s identification. This essay offers an alternative: the negotiative theory of identity. Unlike epistemic FPA, the negotiative theory doesn't presume the reliability of self-directed beliefs. Unlike ethical FPA, the negotiative theory
doesn’t imply an obligation not to reject. Instead, it contends that an act of rejection is morally permissible if and only if it respects three ethical and epistemic constraints. In doing so, the negotiative theory combines the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of both versions of FPA, and gives us substantive insight into how far first-person authority reaches in terms of grounding rights and obligating others.

Universities regulate speech in various ways: they disinvite some speakers and invite others in their stead; they cancel events entirely; they make it financially impossible for students to organize events in the first place; they interpret speech as harassment, and then discipline the speaker; they develop speech codes against “offensive” speech; they discourage faculty from developing certain courses or covering certain material in existing courses.  How should we assess when such restrictions are justified, if they ever are?

Here, we propose an answer to this question. In short, we argue that we should think about speech restrictions as being like acts of war, and so should approach their justification using just war theory. We also make some suggestions about its implications. For instance, one of the jus ad bellum requirements for a just war is that you have a reasonable hope of success; you shouldn’t enter or continue a war unless you’ve got good reason to think that your objectives are achievable. We offer some reasons to think that many speech restrictions fail to pass this test in our current political climate: we are too far from the kind of society that universities hope to create via speech restrictions, and in employing them, they only exacerbate the problems they’re trying to solve.

During the Second World War, the Allies faced a question colloquially known as the “German Tank Problem”: how many tanks will the Axis ever produce? The answer resulted from an elegant probabilistic argument which was used by Allied mathematicians to make successful upper-bound estimates for the total Axis tank production. This paper shows that if two empirical postulates are true of the history of science, a parallel argument can be used to come up with lower-bound estimates for the number of alternative scientific theories that remain undiscovered. The lower bound in question increases proportionally with the number of theories that have already been discovered. So, the problem of underconsideration is a serious problem and it will get worse, not better, as we discover new theories.

This paper deploys a Cantor-style diagonal argument which indicates that there is more possible mathematical content than there are propositional functions in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and similar formal systems. This technical result raises a historical question: "How did Russell, who was himself an expert in diagonal arguments, not see this coming?" It turns out that answering this question requires an appreciation of Russell's understanding of what logic is, and how he construed the relationship between logic and Principia Mathematica.

Ed Gein was a serial killer, grave robber, and body snatcher who made a lampshade from human skin. Now consider the detective who found that lampshade. Let's suppose that he would never want to own it; however, he does find that he wants a synthetic one just like it – a perfect replica. We assume that there is something morally problematic about the detective having such a replica. We then argue that, given as much, we can reach the surprising conclusion that it's morally problematic to consume realistic fake-meat products. After explaining why we might the detective's replica lampshade morally problematic, we clarify the analogy between the replica and fake meat products. Then, we defend it against a number of objections, the most notable one being we can sever any association between fake meat and the real stuff without moral cost. We conclude by pointing out that our argument generalizes: if it works, then there is something morally problematic about many fake animal products, including fake leather and fur.