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The plans in so far as they were a set of intentions, say, would themselves be dispositions, perhaps made up of many others, that were geared to manifest (ultimately) in their own executions.
Full disclosure: I have so far been cognizant of parsimony (Ockham’s Razor), explanatory power (avoiding what Dennett calls Ockham’s broom—sweeping inconvenient evidence under the carpet) and coherence with other theories, not with elegance.
Incidentally this drive to reduce dependence on testimony and to enable the achievement of valid inferences from primary data and evidence helps to explain why it’s good for students to experience original artifacts, rather than representations of them in textbooks and documentaries, which constitute of a form of testimony. This is my tentative solution to a puzzle that Clare Jarmy (2019) has identified regarding why schools should invest money in field trips and other forms of access to artefacts.
Following Ronald Dworkin and others, I say ‘morality’ now rather than ‘ethics’, to track the difference between what we owe to each other and what makes our lives go better or worse.
To the letter, that seems more general than my claim, which is simply that children should not be initiated into comprehensive doctrines.
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Tillson, J. Rationality, Religious Belief, and Shaping Dispositions: Replies to Carruth, Gatley, Levy, Kotzee and Rocha. Stud Philos Educ 41, 135–149 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09809-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09809-1