Thought experiments invite us to evaluate philosophical theses by making judgments about hypothetical cases. When the judgments and the theses conflict, it is often the latter that are rejected. But what is the nature of the judgments such that they are able to play this role? I answer this question by arguing that typical judgments about thought experiments are in fact judgments of normal counterfactual sufficiency. I begin by focussing on Anna-Sara Malmgren's defence of the claim that typical judgments about thought experiments are mere possibility judgments. This view is shown to fail for two closely related reasons: it cannot account for the incorrectness of certain misjudgments, and it cannot account for the inconsistency of certain pairs of conflicting judgments. This prompts a reconsideration of Timothy Williamson's alternative proposal, according to which typical judgments about thought experiments are counterfactual in nature. I show that taking such judgments to concern what would normally hold in instances of the relevant hypothetical scenarios avoids the objections that have been pressed against this kind of view. I then consider some other potential objections, but argue that they provide no grounds for doubt.
According to animalism, each of us is numerically identical to a human animal. Disunity cases—cases in which a human animal lacks some form of mental unity—are often thought to pose a problem for animalism. Tim Bayne (2010) has recently offered some novel arguments against animalism based on one particular disunity case, namely Cerberus: a single animal with two heads, each housing its own stream of consciousness. I show that Bayne's arguments are flawed, and that animalism is capable of handling the case.
A deep depression moved rapidly NNE from the Welsh coast across northern England to the Firth of Forth on 1954 December 9. At the same time microseisms of very large amplitude were recorded at Aberdeen, the maximum effect occurring when the centre of low pressure was situated over land. If the disturbances were due to standing waves set up in the sea in accordance with the Longuet-Higgins theory, these waves must have arisen behind the low centre by reflection from the coast. There was no other low centre in the neighbourhood likely to produce the effects. So far as the nature of the microseisms is concerned, the records support the idea that they consist of a mixture of Rayleigh waves and Love waves, and that in the present case they approached Aberdeen from a direction approximately SSW of the station.
1) INTRODUCTORY.--l'hough it has been recognised for centuries that the yield of the crops in any country is greatly dependent on the weather, yet the weather is so complex a quatitity that it has proved very difficult, in fact, in some cases almost impossible, to unravel the effects of the various elements that constitute the weather and so find the effect of each separate element. In tropical and sub-tropical regions abundance or defect of rainfall has, without a doubt, a very iilarlted effect on the yield, and it is doubtless due to this that rainfall was one of the first elements to be studied. But in temperate climates rainfall plays an important part in the crop yield. In a paper by Sir Napier Shaw,' "Seasons in the British Isles from 18i8," the influence of the autumn rainfall on the wheat yield of the following year is discussed, and it is shown that the rainfall of this period has a much greater influenco than liad hitherto been supposed. This was followed up by a very detailed investigation of the yieId of the different crops in Eastern England by R. H. Hooker.2 In his investigation Hooker employed the method of correlation, and his results he found to be in very good agreement with Shaw's conclusions. In Sweden the subject has been dealt with in a very thorough manner by Axel Wallh, while in America J. Warren Smith and in India S. M. Jacob have each endeavoured to solve this
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