Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 (...) pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means. (shrink)

Action must be taken to combat climate change. Yet, how the costs of climate action should be allocated among states remains a question. One popular answer—the polluter-pays principle (PPP)—stipulates that those responsible for causing the problem should pay to address it. While intuitively plausible, the PPP has been subjected to withering criticism in recent years. It is timely, following the Paris Agreement, to develop a new version: one that does not focus on historical production-based emissions but rather allocates climate burdens (...) in proportion to each state’s annual consumption-based emissions. This change in carbon accounting results in a fairer and more environmentally effective principle for distributing climate duties. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to John Rawls’s concern with stability—a concern that, as Rawls himself notes, motivated Part III of A Theory of Justice and some of the more important changes of his political turn. For Rawls, the possibility of achieving ‘stability for the right reasons’ depends on citizens possessing sufficient moral motivation. I argue, however, that the moral psychology Rawls develops to show how such motivation would be cultivated and sustained does not cohere with his specific descriptions of (...) ‘pluralist ’ doctrines. Considering Rawls’s claims that ‘most’ citizens—both in contemporary liberal democracies and in the well-ordered society—possess such doctrines, this incompatibility threatens to undermine his stability arguments. Despite the enormous importance of pluralist doctrines and the potential difficulties they pose for Rawls’s project, remarkably little attention has been paid to them. By critically examining these difficulties, the article begins to address this oversight. (shrink)

Central to W.E.B. Du Bois’s political theory is a conception of “world” remarkably similar to that put forward, years later, by Martin Heidegger. This point is more methodological than historical: I claim that approaching Du Bois’s work as a source, rather than as a product, of concepts that resonated with subsequent thinkers allows us to better appreciate the novelty and vision of his political theory. Exploring this resonance, I argue, helps to refine the notions of world and founding present in (...) each theorist’s work. Yet, it is only by remaining attentive to their differences that we can understand how Du Bois and Heidegger could endorse such dramatically opposed political programs despite similar theoretical starting points. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in risks of societal collapse due to anthropogenic climate change, there exists no consensus about how collapse should be understood. In this article, we critically examine existing definitions and argue that none adequately address the challenges for conceptualizing collapse that climate change presents. We therefore propose an alternative conception, which regards collapse as a reduction of collective capacity resulting in a pervasive and difficult-to-reverse loss of basic functionality. Our conception is dynamic in that it focuses on the (...) interrelations of constituent subsystems. It also distinguishes collapse from transformations needed to address climate change and provides insight into the relationship between collapse and sustainability. [Open access]. (shrink)

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physiological states. However, this assumption, on the part of philosophers or vision scientists, has the effect of simply ruling out certain versions of functionalism. While (...) Nida-Rümelin is quite right to search for empirical tests for claims about the nature of visual states, philosophical issues remain pivotal in determining the correctness of these claims. (shrink)

Given that conspiracies exist, can we be justified in dismissing conspiracy theories without concerning ourselves with specific details? I answer this question by focusing on contrarian conspiracy theories, theories about conspiracies that conflict with testimony from reliable sources of information. For example, theories that say the CIA masterminded the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 was an inside job, or the Freemasons are secretly running the world are contrarian conspiracy theories. When someone argues for a contrarian conspiracy theory, their options (...) are to appeal to eyewitness testimony, incriminating documents, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, allegedly scientific evidence, anomalies, or considerations of cui bono (who benefits). Most laypeople don’t know how to adequately respond to arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories, but this doesn’t mean that it’s dogmatic to reject them. I argue that many laypeople are defeasibly justified in rejecting a variety of contrarian conspiracy theories based on testimony and this justification is rarely defeated by arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories even if we don’t know how to respond to these arguments. (shrink)

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large-scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that researchers are unable to (...) study live juries. The indirect sources of evidence used by researchers suffer from various problems, the most important of which is dubious levels of ecological validity. Real jury research—studying live jury deliberation—is controversial. However, as I argue, the objections to it are unconvincing. There is in fact a moral imperative to facilitate real jury research. (shrink)

Plenitude, roughly, the thesis that for any non-empty region of spacetime there is a material object that is exactly located at that region, is often thought to be part and parcel of the standard Lewisian package in the metaphysics of persistence. While the wedding of plentitude and Lewisian four-dimensionalism is a natural one indeed, there are a hand-full of dissenters who argue against the notion that Lewisian four-dimensionalism has exclusive rights to plentitude. These ‘promiscuous’ three-dimensionalists argue that a temporalized version (...) of plenitude is entirely compatible with a three-dimensional ontology of enduring entities. While few would deny the coherence of such a position, and much work has been done by its proponents to appease critics, there has been surprisingly little by way of exploring the various forms such an ontology might take as well as the potential advantages of one plenitudinous three-dimensional ontology over another. Here I develop a novel form of plenitudinous three-dimensionalism, what John Hawthorne (Metaphysical essays, 2006a, b) has called “Neo-Aristotelian Plenitude,” and argue that if one is inclined to endorse an abundant three-dimensional ontology, one is wise to opt for a plenitude of accidental unities. (shrink)

The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole have (...) had different parts. In this paper I attempt to offer an account of parthood that is intimate enough but not too intimate: the parts generate the whole, but they are not themselves the whole. (shrink)

In this entry, we outline the ways in which evolutionary theory has implications for the objectivity of morality.

Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, (...) instead defending a modestly flexible approach on non-consequentialist grounds. The system I defend is one on which we should impose a higher standard of proof for crimes that attract more severe punishments. This proposal, although apparently revisionary, accords with a plausible theory concerning the epistemology of legal judgments and the role they play in society. (shrink)

Jury science is fraught with difficulty. Since legal and institutional hurdles render it all but impossible to study live criminal jury deliberation, researchers make use of various indirect methods to evaluate jury performance. But each of these methods are open to methodological criticism and, strikingly, some of the highest-profile jury research programmes in recent years have reached opposing conclusions. Uncertainty about jury performance is an obstacle for legal reform—ongoing debates about the ‘justice gap’ for complainants of sexual offences has rendered (...) these problems stark. This paper proposes a way to advance the debate. (shrink)

I first offer a broad taxonomy of models of divine omnipresence in the Christian tradition, both past and present. I then examine the recent model proposed by Hud Hudson (2009, 2014) and Alexander Pruss (2013)—ubiquitous entension—and flag a worry with their account that stems from predominant analyses of the concept of ‘material object’. I then attempt to show that ubiquitous entension has a rich Latin medieval precedent in the work of Augusine and Anselm. I argue that the model of omnipresence (...) explicated by Augustine and Anselm has the resources to avoid the noted worry by offering an alternative account of the divide between the immaterial and the material. I conclude by considering a few alternative analyses of ‘material object’ that make conceptual room for a contemporary Christian theist to follow suite in thinking that at least some immaterial entities are literally spatially located when relating to the denizens of spacetime. (shrink)

We examine moving spotlight theories of time: theories according to which there are past and future events and an objective present moment. In Section 1, we briefly discuss the origins of the view. In Section 2, we describe the traditional moving spotlight view, which we understand as an ‘enriched’ B-theory of time, and raise some problems for that view. In the next two sections, we describe versions of the moving spotlight view that we think are better and which solve those (...) problems. In Section 3, we describe a version of the view that combines permanentism – the thesis that all things always exist – with propositional temporalism, the thesis that some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false. In Section 4, we discuss a version of the view that is like an ‘enriched’ presentism. We conclude with some brief thoughts on issues that remain outstanding. (shrink)

According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from the (...) notion of mechanism and that this difference matters for our understanding of causation and explanation in science. (shrink)

Non-well-founded set theories allow set-theoretic exotica that standard ZFC will not allow, such as a set that has itself as its sole member. We can distinguish plenitudinous non-well-founded set theories, such as Boffa set theory, that allow infinitely many such sets, from restrictive theories, such as Finsler-Aczel or AFA, that allow exactly one. Plenitudinous non-well-founded set theories face a puzzle: nothing seems to explain the identity or distinctness of various of the sets they countenance. In this paper I aim to (...) sharpen this puzzle, make clear who it does and does not apply to and, ultimately, to argue in favor of a plenitudinous theory like Boffa. (shrink)

Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework (...) is provided for understanding these explanations–this framework addresses puzzles regarding the mysterious causal influence of social structure, how to understand its relation to individual choice, and what makes it the main explanatory (and causally responsible) factor for various outcomes. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

This article canvases some of the issues involved in the idea of form as a practice in Kant, Blumenberg and Foucault, and it also outlines the different contexts and approaches the individual papers collected in this Special Issue use to explore this idea.

2015 Reprint of 1956 Printing. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Cybernetics is here defined as "the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine"-in a word, as the art of steersmanship; and this book will interest all who are interested in cybernetics, communication theory and methods for regulation and control. W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His two (...) books, "Design for a Brain" and "An Introduction to Cybernetics," were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential. Contents include: What is new -- Change -- The Determinate Machine -- The Machine with Input -- Stability -- The Black Box -- Quantity of Variety -- Transmission of Variety -- Incessant Transmission -- Regulation in Biological Systems -- Requisite Variety -- The Error-controlled Regulator -- Regulating the Very Large System -- Amplifying Regulation. (shrink)

This paper deals with a collection of concerns that, over a period of time, led the author away from the Routley–Meyer semantics, and towards proof- theoretic approaches to relevant logics, and indeed to the weak relevant logic MC of meaning containment.

The divine attributes of immensity and omnipresence have been integral to classical Christian confession regarding the nature of the triune God. Divine immensity and omnipresence are affirmed in doctrinal standards such as the Athanasian Creed (c. 500), the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Basel (1431–49), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), and the First Vatican Council (1869–70). In the first section of this chapter, I offer a brief (...) historical overview of divine immensity and divine omnipresence in the Christian tradition. I then offer a brief taxonomy of contemporary models of divine omnipresence in the philosophical and theological landscape. In the second, more constructive section, I aim to gesture toward the retrieval of several classical insights regarding immensity and omnipresence that remain unexplored in contemporary analytic work. (shrink)

One influential approach seeks to capture the idea of society by characterising social action, or interaction, in terms of the particular kinds of awareness it involves. Another approach focuses on social order, seeing it as a form of order that arises spontaneously when rational and mutually aware individuals succeed in solving co-ordination problems. Yet another approach focuses on the role played by communication in achieving collective agreement on the way the world is to be classified and understood, where this is (...) seen as a pre-condition of co-ordination and co-operation. This encyclopedia entry provides a brief account of each approach and offers an assessment of their stengths and limitations. (shrink)

Researchers face perennial difficulties in studying live jury deliberation. As a result, the academic community struggles to reach a consensus on key matters of legal reform concerning jury trials. The hurdles faced by empirical jury researchers are often legal or institutional. This note argues that the legal and institutional barriers preventing live deliberation research should be removed and discusses two forms that live deliberation research could take.

We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism combines Millikan's teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The paper has two goals. First, we outline how a teleosemantic treatment of signal passing in predictive processing systems would work, and how it integrates with structural resemblance accounts. We show that the core explanatory motivations and conceptual machinery of teleosemantics and predictive processing mesh together well. Second, we argue this pluralist approach expands the range of empirical cases to (...) which the predictive processing framework might be successfully applied. This is because our pluralism is practice-oriented. A range of different notions of content are used in the cognitive sciences to explain behaviour, and some of these cases look to employ teleosemantic notions. As a result, our pluralism gives predictive processing the scope to cover these cases. (shrink)

* Special Issue on the Philosophical Dimensions of the Trial* This summarises and discusses the contributions.

Recent work by Stout and colleagues indicates that the neural correlates of language and Early Stone Age toolmaking overlap significantly. The aim of this paper is to add computational detail to their findings. I use an error minimisation model to outline where the information processing overlap between toolmaking and language lies. I argue that the Early Stone Age signals the emergence of complex structured representations. I then highlight a feature of my account: It allows us to understand the early evolution (...) of syntax in terms of an increase in the number and complexity of models in a cognitive system, rather than the development of new types of processing. (shrink)

The so-called Final Ranking of the Philebus offers Socrates’ final evaluation of the relative merits of pleasure and reason in the best life. I begin by examining two common lines of interpretation as they address the criterion according to which the final ranking is organized. I then discuss the role ‘similarity’ has in organizing the investigation throughout the dialogue, from the initial comparison of the two lives (of reason and pleasure singly) down through the final ranking. I then consider the (...) thematic discussions of pleasure and reason separately, arguing that their treatments display an intriguing structural similarity. Next, I propose my own reading of the final ranking, whereby the ‘dependence’ relation at work in those two specific discussions may be see as the through-line of all (now five) tiers of the final ranking. I conclude by suggesting that this interpretation is able to preserve what is worthwhile in the two traditional lines of interpretation, while avoiding the pitfalls that tend to accompany them. (shrink)

One notable area in analytic metaphysics that has seen a revival of Aristotelian and scho- lastic inspired metaphysics is the return to a more robust construal of the notion of essence, what some have labelled “real” or “serious” essentialism. However, it is only recently that this more robust notion of essence has been implemented into the debate on truthmaking, mainly by the work of E. J. Lowe. The first part of the paper sets out to explore the scholastic roots of (...) essential dependence as well as an account of truthmaking for accidental predications in terms of accidents. Along the way, the author examines the dialectical role the possibility of separated accidents in the Eucharist play with respect to developing a scholastic account of truthmaking as essential dependence. In conclusion the author utilises Aquinas’s hylomorphic ontology to suggest a new way forward for an essentialist account of truthmaking. (shrink)

Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, (...) instead defending a modestly flexible approach on non-consequentialist grounds. The system I defend is one on which we should impose a higher standard of proof for crimes that attract more severe punishments. This proposal, although apparently revisionary, accords with a plausible theory concerning the epistemology of legal judgments and the role they play in society. (shrink)

Recently, the practice of deciding legal cases on purely statistical evidence has been widely criticised. Many feel uncomfortable with finding someone guilty on the basis of bare probabilities, even though the chance of error might be stupendously small. This is an important issue: with the rise of DNA profiling, courts are increasingly faced with purely statistical evidence. A prominent line of argument—endorsed by Blome-Tillmann 2017; Smith 2018; and Littlejohn 2018—rejects the use of such evidence by appealing to epistemic norms that (...) apply to individual inquirers. My aim in this paper is to rehabilitate purely statistical evidence by arguing that, given the broader aims of legal systems, there are scenarios in which relying on such evidence is appropriate. Along the way I explain why popular arguments appealing to individual epistemic norms to reject legal reliance on bare statistics are unconvincing, by showing that courts and individuals face different epistemic predicaments (in short, individuals can hedge when confronted with statistical evidence, whilst legal tribunals cannot). I also correct some misconceptions about legal practice that have found their way into the recent literature. (shrink)

This chapter aims to explore the intersection of Christian theism, a neo-Aristotelian gloss on metaphysical grounding, and creaturely participation in God. In section one, I aim to de- velop several core tenets at the heart of a theistic participatory ontology as it is found in the Christian tradition, what I call minimal participatory ontology. In section two, I examine the contemporary notion of metaphysical grounding, namely the formal and structure features of the grounding relation, and offer a grounding-theoretic framework for (...) understanding a mini- mal participatory ontology. Finally, in section three, I put forward a neo-Aristotelian account of metaphysical grounding in particular, one that is uniquely suited to capture the central tenets of minimal participatory ontology. (shrink)

Recent years have seen fresh impetus brought to debates about the proper role of statistical evidence in the law. Recent work largely centres on a set of puzzles known as the ‘proof paradox’. While these puzzles may initially seem academic, they have important ramifications for the law: raising key conceptual questions about legal proof, and practical questions about DNA evidence. This article introduces the proof paradox, why we should care about it, and new work attempting to resolve it.

I offer a concise critique of a recurring line of reasoning advanced by Joseph LaPorte and Samir Okasha that all modern species concepts render the view that biological organisms essentially belong to their species empirically untenable. The argument, I claim, trades on a crucial modal ambiguity that collapses the de re/de dicto distinction. Contra their claim that the continued adherence of such a view on behalf of contemporary metaphysicians stems from the latter’s ignorance of developments in modern biology, the modal (...) ambiguity reveals the need to retrain in modal metaphysics. (shrink)

In his article “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil,” Kirk R. MacGregor has argued that the Christian theist need not demur at the existence of gratuitous evil. In fact, we are told that Christian theists have ample philosophical, theological, and biblical evidence in favor of the existence of gratuitous evil. In this brief note I examine both the general structure of his argument as well as several of his more central arguments in favor of gratuitous evil and the compatibility (...) of such evil with Christian theism. (shrink)

It is argued that reliance on the testimony of others cannot be viewed as reliance on a kind of evidence. Speech being essentially voluntary, the speaker cannot see his own choice of words as evidence of their truth, and so cannot honestly offer them to others as such. Rather, in taking responsibility for the truth of what he says, the speaker offers a guarantee or assurance of its truth, and in believing him the hearer accepts this assurance. I argue that, (...) contrary to appearances, this account is compatible with the hearer acquiring knowledge, and in fact throws interesting light on the idea of knowledge. -/- . (shrink)

Recent work takes both philosophical and scientific progress to consist in acquiring factive epistemic states such as knowledge. However, much of this work leaves unclear what entity is the subject of these epistemic states. Furthermore, by focusing only on states like knowledge, we overlook progress in intermediate cases between ignorance and knowledge—for example, many now celebrated theories were initially so controversial that they were not known. -/- This paper develops an improved framework for thinking about intellectual progress. Firstly, I argue (...) that we should think of progress relative to the epistemic position of an intellectual community rather than individual inquirers. Secondly, I show how focusing on the extended process of inquiry (rather than the mere presence or absence of states like knowledge) provides a better evaluation of different types of progress. This includes progress through formulating worthwhile questions, acquiring new evidence, and increasing credence on the right answers to these questions. I close by considering the ramifications for philosophical progress, suggesting that my account supports rejecting the most negative views while allowing us to articulate different varieties of optimism and pessimism. (shrink)

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an important and underappreciated phenomenon associated with epistemic expressions — a phenomenon that we call (...) reversibility. We argue that the invariantist account of disagreement is incompatible with reversibility, and we go on to show that reversible sentences cast doubt on the putative data about disagreement, even without assuming invariantism. Our argument therefore undermines much of the motivation for invariantism, and provides a new source for constraints on the proper explanation of purported data about disagreement. (shrink)

I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...) dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...) virtue? And do epistemic virtues need to be reliable? I will sketch an account on which curiosity is only virtuous when rooted in a non-instrumental appreciation of epistemic goods, before arguing that curiosity can exhibit intellectual virtue irrespective of whether one is reliable in satisfying it. (shrink)

Introduction and Discussion of a Special Issue in philosophy of law "Philosophical Dimensions of the Trial" -/- .

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...) notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence. (shrink)

The increasing demand for transparency in AI has recently come under scrutiny. The question is often posted in terms of “epistemic double standards”, and whether the standards for transparency in AI ought to be higher than, or equivalent to, our standards for ordinary human reasoners. I agree that the push for increased transparency in AI deserves closer examination, and that comparing these standards to our standards of transparency for other opaque systems is an appropriate starting point. I suggest that a (...) more fruitful exploration of this question will involve a different comparison class. We routinely treat judgments made by highly trained experts in specialized fields as fair or well-grounded even though—by the nature of expert/layperson division of epistemic labor—an expert will not be able to provide an explanation of the reasoning behind these judgments that makes sense to most other people. Regardless, laypeople are thought to be acting reasonably—and ethically—in deferring to the judgments of experts that concern their areas of specialization. I suggest that we reframe our question regarding the appropriate standards of transparency in AI as one that asks when, why, and to what degree it would be ethical to accept opacity in AI. I argue that our epistemic relation to certain opaque AI technology may be relevantly similar to the layperson’s epistemic relation to the expert in certain respects, such that the successful expert/layperson division of epistemic labor can serve as a blueprint for the ethical use of opaque AI. (shrink)

From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions, this essay argues that one of the major problems in Benjamin’s thinking is how to make certain forms of materiality stand out against other forms. In his early work, the way that Benjamin deals with this problem is to call degraded forms “symbolic”, and those forms of materiality with positive value, “allegorical”. The article shows how there is more than an incidental (...) connection with the recent approach to ritual in the field of history of religions, seeing that Benjamin too wants to set out the significance of certain material forms against those that are “ritualistic” and hence false. It is argued that he treats the latter in his essay on Elective Affinities and the former in his Trauerspiel. The key claim is that the way material forms stand out as meaningful is akin to the Kantian description of the aesthetic attitude, which identifies how certain formations warrant and attract reflective attention and underpin moral orientation. The point is significant since Kantian aesthetics is an object of polemical attention across Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus. Moreover, the approach shows the main difficulty in Benjamin’s treatment of sensible forms: what are the criteria he uses to distinguish the “bad” way a sensible form has of being meaningful from the “good”? (shrink)