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³ Op. cit. note 1, 139.

⁴ James, William, Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) (Original work published 1907), 34Google Scholar.

⁵ Rorty, Richard, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

⁶ Williams, Bernard, ‘Deciding to Believe’, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Op. cit. note 4, 109.

⁸ Rorty, Richard, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Kitcher, Philip, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Longino, Helen E., Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar should be read as claiming that indeed certain scientific institutions are so organized.

¹¹ Indeed there is a very large literature proposing alternative algorithms for belief corpus modification, upon the introduction of new propositions into a given corpus.

¹² Glaucon formulates his original Gyges story to secure a similar leverage against Socates's position, and in favor of his own proposal to the effect that pursuit of self-interest and pursuit of justice are decidedly different things. The Gyges stratagem works for Glaucon the same way I should like it to work for my case in the present context.

¹³ Cognitive theories of vision-for-action – for example, Milner, A.D. and Goodale, M. A., The Visual Brain in Action (New York: Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar – provides strong independent evidence for this claim, though there is no space here to elaborate the point.

¹⁴ Kitcher, Philip, Science, Truth and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Cf. Irwin, T., ‘Aristotle’. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) (Taylor and Francis, 2002)Google Scholar. This corroborates certain sentiments – those that provoked J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein to quietism – to the effect that when one asks ‘How do I know there is a hand here?’ one is not seeking an answer to an ordinary question at all, but only a philosophical answer. Austin and Wittgenstein famously held that there is none to give.

¹⁶ This in not the place to say what these standards are. And in any case, the matter is subject to some controversy.

¹⁷ Recognition of this fact is one route to solving certain philosophical puzzles of recent vintage, problems having to do with strategy: puzzles of deterrence, or of coordination where there are multiple Nash equilibria, and the toxin puzzle (where prudence as such seems to get in the way). All of these problems lend themselves to better solution via Gyges' ring than through a process of ratiocination in which along the way we acquire also materials that undermine a desirable target belief.

¹⁸ Rather more directly, I should think, from what Hume had in mind.

¹⁹ Ever since the appearance of the influential work of Maynard-Smith, John, Evolution and the Theory of Games (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this characterization of the social has been heavily articulated.

²⁰ And there is a growing school of social scientists directing enormous creative energies towards founding a quantitative science of culture and anthropology, in this spirit. Many of them reserve a space for cultural transmission as independent, normally also admit of vector combinations of biological and cultural forces. See for example Boyd, R. and Richerson, P., Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Cavalli-Sforza, L. and Feldman, M., Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google ScholarPubMed. Skyrms, Brian, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers a modeling strategy (called ‘replicator dynamics’) that can be utilized to model both types of forces.

²¹ Craig, Edward, Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

²² Grice, H. P., (1975) Logic and conversation, in Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, 41–58, New York: Academic PressGoogle Scholar. Reprinted in Grice, H. P. (ed.), Studies in the Way of Words, 22–40, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1989)Google Scholar.