A detailed axiomatisation of diagrams (in affine geometry) is presented, which supports typing of geometric objects, calculation of geometric quantities and automated proof of theorems.

Proof by refutation of a geometry theorem that is not universally true produces a Gröbner basis whose elements, called side polynomials, may be used to give inequations that can be added to the hypotheses to give a valid theorem. We show that (in a certain sense) all possible subsidiary conditions are implied by those obtained from the basis; that what we call the kind of truth of the theorem may be derived from the basis; and that the side polynomials may (...) be classified in a useful way. We analyse the relationship between side polynomials and kinds of truth, and we give a unified algorithmic treatment of side polynomials, with examples generated by an implementation. (shrink)

REVIEW OF: The Symbolic Species - The co-evolution of language and the human brain, by Terrence Deacon, Penguin, 527pp, 1997. -/- Terrence Deacon works at the interface between neurobiology, developmental biology and biological anthropology. He is ideally placed to bring together the insights of the very different sciences of palaeontology and physiology into the nature and origins of language. The pleasures of his book are in the detail, the expert knowledge that the author brings to bear, the lucidity of writing (...) that must at times be quite technical. -/- The reviewer sees a main inadequacy of the book in its cavalier treatment of language itself, and especially of what the author calls "Chomsky's Handstand". (shrink)

REVIEW OF: Automated Development of Fundamental Mathematical Theories by Art Quaife. (1992: Kluwer Academic Publishers) 271pp. Using the theorem prover OTTER Art Quaife has proved four hundred theorems of von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel set theory; twelve hundred theorems and definitions of elementary number theory; dozens of Euclidean geometry theorems; and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. It is an impressive achievement. To gauge its significance and to see what prospects it offers this review looks closely at the book and the proofs it presents.

One may say without great exaggeration that Grassmann invented linear algebra and, with none at all, that he showed how properly to apply it in geometry.

I am interested in understanding what happens. It goes without saying, at least for me, that physics — I mean 20th. Century physics — is our best account so far of what happens, very compelling and astonishingly successful. But physics, as is well-known has some deep problems. I have slowly come to realise that the source of those problems is a philosophical mistake, a mistake that is not restricted to physicists but shared by nearly everyone. To put it briefly, it (...) is the belief of nearly everyone that there is just one reality and just one truth, the truth about that reality. I think that physics can be made right, or at least made better, by dropping that faith and accepting that there are many realities, and consequently many times, and that truths about those realities are not given but are reached by agreement. (shrink)

This is merely the longish abstract of a talk I gave in 2001, that now seems to make more sense than ever.

There has been an increasing interest into how to build Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs) that make moral decisions on the basis of causation rather than mere correction. One promising avenue for achieving this is to use a causal modelling approach. This paper explores an open and important problem with such an approach; namely, the problem of what makes a causal model an appropriate model. I explore why we need to establish criteria for what makes a model appropriate, and offer-up such (...) criteria which appeals to normative considerations. (shrink)

As the principle of natural selection is generalized to explain (adaptive) patterns of human behavior, it becomes less clear what the selective environment empirically refers to. While the environment and individual are relatively separable in the non-human biological context, they are highly entangled in the context of moral, social, and institutional evolution. This chapter brings attention to the problem of generalizing the selective environment, and argues that it is ontologically disunified and definable only through its explanatory function. What unifies the (...) selective environment is that it explains adaptation in a non-agential way, by screening off various forms of agency, whether divine, organismic, or human. This explanatory function of the selective environment helps avoid some sources of confusion when the theory of natural selection is applied to humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

In the past decade, policy-makers in science have been concerned with harmonizing research integrity standards across Europe. These standards are encapsulated in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Yet, almost every European country today has its own national-level code of conduct for research integrity. In this study we document in detail how national-level codes diverge on almost all aspects concerning research integrity – except for what constitutes egregious misconduct. Besides allowing for potentially unfair responses to joint misconduct by (...) international collaborations, we argue that the divergences raise questions about the envisaged self-regulatory function of the codes of conduct. (shrink)

The success of precision medicine depends on obtaining large amounts of information about at-risk populations. However, getting consent is often difficult. Why? In this commentary I point to the differentials in social status involved. These differentials are inevitable once personal information is surrendered, but are particularly intense when the studied populations are socioeconomically or socioculturally disadvantaged and/or ethnically stigmatized groups. I suggest how the deep distrust of the latter groups can be partially justified as a lack of confidence that their (...) core values or interests will sufficiently be taken into account. Hence, the ethical challenge here lies not in avoiding status differentials, but in dealing with them appropriately. Scientists should not assume trust from others but adopt a norm of “demonstrating trustworthiness”. (shrink)

Background Professional communities such as the medical community are acutely concerned with negligence: the category of misconduct where a professional does not live up to the standards expected of a professional of similar qualifications. Since science is currently strengthening its structures of self-regulation in parallel to the professions, this raises the question to what extent the scientific community is concerned with negligence, and if not, whether it should be. By means of comparative analysis of medical and scientific codes of conduct, (...) we aim to highlight the role of negligence provisions in codes of conduct for scientists, and to discuss the normative consequences for future codes of conduct. -/- Methods We collected scientific and medical codes of conduct in a selection of OECD countries, and submitted each code of conduct to comparative textual analysis. -/- Results Negligence is invariably listed as an infraction of the norms of integrity in medical codes of conduct, but only rarely so in the scientific codes. When the latter list negligence, they typically do not provide any detail on the meaning of ‘negligence’. -/- Discussion Unlike codes of conduct for professionals, current codes of conduct for scientists are largely silent on the issue of negligence, or explicitly exclude negligence as a type of misconduct. In the few cases where negligence is stipulated to constitute misconduct, no responsibilities are identified that would help prevent negligence. While we caution against unreasonable negligence provisions as well as disproportionate sanctioning systems, we do argue that negligence provisions are crucial for justified trust in the scientific community, and hence that there is a very strong rationale for including negligence provisions in codes of conduct. (shrink)

Codes of ethics currently offer no guidance to scientists acting in capacity of expert. Yet communicating their expertise is one of the most important activities of scientists. Here I argue that expert communication has a specifically ethical dimension, and that experts must face a fundamental trade-off between "actionability" and "transparency" when communicating. Some recommendations for expert communication are suggested.

We propose that measures of information integration can be more straightforwardly interpreted as measures of agency rather than of consciousness. This may be useful to the goals of consciousness research, given how agency and consciousness are “duals” in many (although not all) respects.

Implicit contextual factors mean that the boundary between causal and noncausal explanation is not as neat as one might hope: as the phenomenon to be explained is given descriptions with varying degrees of granularity, the nature of the favored explanation alternates between causal and non-causal. While it is not surprising that different descriptions of the same phenomenon should favor different explanations, it is puzzling why re-describing the phenomenon should make any difference for the causal nature of the favored explanation. I (...) argue that this is a problem for the ontic framework of causal and noncausal explanation, and instead propose a pragmatic-modal account of causal and non-causal explanation. This account has the added advantage of dissolving several important disagreements concerning the status of non-causal explanation. (shrink)

Environmental heterogeneity is invoked as a key explanatory factor in the adaptive evolution of a surprisingly wide range of phenomena. This article aims to analyze this explanatory scheme of categorizing traits or properties as adaptations to environmental heterogeneity. First it is suggested that this scheme can be understood as a reaction to how heterogeneity adaptations were discounted or ignored in the modern synthesis. Then a positive account is proposed, distinguishing between two broad categories of adaptation to environmental heterogeneity: properties selected (...) for by well-defined patterns of environmental heterogeneity, and properties that help organisms exploit novel patterns of environmental heterogeneity. (shrink)

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

The counterfactual tradition to defining actual causation has come a long way since Lewis started it off. However there are still important open problems that need to be solved. One of them is the (in)transitivity of causation. Endorsing transitivity was a major source of trouble for the approach taken by Lewis, which is why currently most approaches reject it. But transitivity has never lost its appeal, and there is a large literature devoted to understanding why this is so. Starting from (...) a survey of this work, we will develop a formal analysis of transitivity and the problems it poses for causation. This analysis provides us with a sufficient condition for causation to be transitive, a sufficient condition for dependence to be necessary for causation, and several characterisations of the transitivity of dependence. Finally, we show how this analysis leads naturally to several conditions a definition of causation should satisfy, and use those to suggest a new definition of causation. (shrink)

Philosophers of science and metascientists alike typically model scientists’ behavior as driven by credit maximization. In this article I argue that this modeling assumption cannot account for how scientists have a default level of trust in each other’s assertions. The normative implication of this is that science policy should not focus solely on incentive reform.

Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to appreciate (...) the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. It argues that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. The essay shows that the view has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration. (shrink)

Despite its public visibility and impact on policy, the activity of expert communication rarely receives more than a passing mention in codes of scientific integrity. This paper makes the case for an ethics of expert communication, introducing a framework where expert communication is represented as an intrinsically ethical activity of a deliberative agent. Ethical expert communication cannot be ensured by complying with various requirements, such as restricting communications to one's area of expertise or disclosing conflicts of interest. Expert communication involves (...) morally laden trade‐offs that must be weighed by a deliberative agent. A basic normative framework is introduced, and concrete provisions are proposed for codes of scientific integrity. (shrink)

in april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...) obtaining the endowed chair at Harvard's department of philosophy, the former taking up the position at Harvard's psychology department.2Besides these biographical parallels, there also... (shrink)

In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic principles, and construct a definition of causation that satisfies them. We define the concepts of counterfactual dependence and production, and put (...) forward principles such that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, whereas production is an insufficient but necessary condition. The resulting definition of causation is a suitable compromise between dependence and production. Every principle is introduced by means of a paradigmatic example of causation. We illustrate some of the benefits of our approach with two examples that have spelled trouble for other accounts. We make all of this formally precise using structural equations, which we extend with a timing over all events. (shrink)

Algorithm engineering is sometimes portrayed as a new 21st century return of manipulative social engineering. Yet algorithms are necessary tools for individuals to navigate online platforms. Algorithms are like a sensory apparatus through which we perceive online platforms: this is also why individuals can be subtly but pervasively manipulated by biased algorithms. How can we better understand the nature of algorithm engineering and its proper function? In this chapter I argue that algorithm engineering can be best conceptualized as a type (...) of environmental engineering aimed at making the online environment more hospitable to human use, in particular by safeguarding the conditions that allow for trust. (shrink)

In the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second World War, a small number of European philosophers of science emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the (...) impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of science as a subtler alternative. (shrink)

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...) speakers intend to convey. (shrink)

Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T Uller (...) Evolutionary causation: Biological and philosophical reflections, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019). In this paper, we distinguish between two fundamentally different ways in which organisms are active participants: as agents and as contributors. Roughly, organisms act as agents when niche constructing effects are a result of a goal-directed behavior over which the organisms have some degree of control. Organisms act as contributors when the niche constructing effects do not arise from a goal to perform the constructive activity. As illustrative examples we discuss plants altering leaf-morphology to optimize light exposure as reported by Sultan and bacteria creating novel niches through excreting energy-rich metabolites. The difference between agential and contributional niche construction is important for understanding the different ways organisms can actively participate in development, ecology, and evolution. Additionally, this distinction can increase our understanding of how the capacity of agency is distributed across the tree of life and how agency influences developmental and evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Claims that our species is an “evolutionary success” typically do not feature prominently in academic articles. However, they do seem to be a recurring trope in science popularization. Why do we seem to be attracted to viewing human evolution through the lense of “success”? In this chapter we discuss how evolutionary success has both causal-descriptive and ethical-normative components, and how its ethical status is ambiguous, with possible hints of anthropocentrism. We also place the concept of “success” in a wider context (...) of biological thought, contrasting it with two other value-laden concepts: evolutionary progress and human uniqueness. Claiming the human species to be an evolutionary success is ostensibly grounded in metrics such as the dominance or the size of the human population, but often goes beyond this, suggesting that humans are a unique species or the pinnacle of evolutionary progress. (shrink)

The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that (...) it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI. (shrink)

Historical reconstructions of the effects of the intellectual migration are typically informed by one of two conflicting narratives. Some scholars argue that refugee philosophers, in particular the logical positivists, contributed to the demise of distinctly American schools of thought. Others reject this ‘eclipse view’ and argue that postwar analytic philosophy can best be characterized as a synthesis of American and positivist views. This paper studies the fate of one of the most influential schools of U.S. philosophy—Columbia naturalism—and argues that both (...) narratives are part of a larger story. First, I reconstruct the rise of the Columbia school, focusing on its naturalist analyses of science, morality, and religion as well as its contributions to the history of ideas. Next, I trace some of the naturalists’ contacts with German philosophers and show that they encountered a strong bifurcation between historical and scientific philosophy in their discussions. I argue that a similar distinction gradually infected debates between naturalists, eventually resulting in a split within the Columbia school itself. The historically-oriented naturalists, I argue, were overshadowed by the analytic movement, whereas the science-minded naturalists were able to incorporate the views of the émigrés, thereby developing the tradition in new directions. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that current attempts at classifying life–mind continuity (LMC) feature several important ambiguities. We can resolve these ambiguities by distinguishing between the extensional, categorical, and systematic relationships that LMC might encompass. In Sect. 1, I begin by introducing the notion of LMC and the theory behind it. In Sect. 2, I show how different ideas of mind shape different approaches to continuity and how to achieve its aim. In Sect. 3, I canvas various canonical formulations and (...) classifications of LMC; I then demonstrate that they retain important ambiguities. Section 4 builds on this by arguing that we must conceive of the extensional and categorical aspects of continuity independently. In Sect. 5, I show further that current literature has underexplored multiple systematic aspects of continuity. I then take a constructive approach in Sect. 6 by providing a classification model for LMC based on extensional and categorical commitments. Here, I comment on aspects of the thesis omitted from the model but essential for a full classification and thorough comparison between various approaches to LMC. All of these arguments lay the foundation for more exhaustively classifying accounts of LMC. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the (...) Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)

Susanne Langer was a student at Radcliffe College between 1916 and 1926---a highly transitional period in the history of American philosophy. Intellectual generalists such as William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce had dominated philosophical debates at the turn of the century but the academic landscape gradually started to shift in the years after World War I. Many scholars of the new generation adopted a more piecemeal approach to philosophy---solving clearly delineated, technical puzzles using the so-called “method of logical analysis”. (...) Especially at Harvard, the intellectual climate rapidly changed. The department hired several philosophers who had contributed to the development of symbolic logic---H. M. Sheffer, C. I. Lewis, and A. N. Whitehead---and Harvard quickly began to be viewed as a central hub for analytic philosophy in the United States. This chapter contextualizes Langer’s earliest work by reading it through the lens of this shifting academic environment. Though Harvard did not allow women to take its courses until 1943, Langer is one of the most significant fruits of this period. Her dissertation “A Logical Analysis of Meaning” and her first publications are all illustrations of the approach that came to dictate the American philosophical conversation. By exploring the increased focus on the logical-analytic method and Langer’s attempts to expand the new approach to what she later called “non-discursive” symbolisms, I situate her publications in the intellectual context of the 1920s. (shrink)

Andreas & Günther have recently proposed a difference-making definition of actual causation. In this paper I show that there exist conclusive counterexamples to their definition, by which I mean examples that are unacceptable to everyone, including AG. Concretely, I show that their definition allows c to cause e even when c is not a causal ancestor of e. I then proceed to identify their non-standard definition of causal models as the source of the problem, and argue that there is no (...) viable strategy open to AG to fixing it. I conclude that their definition of causation is damaged beyond repair. (shrink)

The adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)

Some of the most significant policy responses to cases of fraudulent and questionable conduct by scientists have been to strengthen professionalism among scientists, whether by codes of conduct, integrity boards, or mandatory research integrity training programs. Yet there has been little systematic discussion about what professionalism in scientific research should mean. In this paper I draw on the sociology of the professions and on data comparing codes of conduct in science to those in the professions, in order to examine what (...) precisely the model of professionalism implies for scientific research. I argue that professionalism, more than any other single organizational logic, is appropriate for scientific research, and that codes of conduct for scientists should strengthen statements concerning scientific autonomy and competence, as well as the scientific service ideal. (shrink)

W. V. Quine is arguably the intellectual father of contemporary naturalism, the idea that there is no distinctively philosophical perspective on reality. Yet, even though Quine has always been a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the early 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct the genesis of Quine’s ideas on the relation between science and philosophy. Scrutinizing his unpublished papers and notebooks, I examine Quine’s development in the first decades of his career. After identifying three (...) commitments supporting his naturalism—viz. empiricism, holism, and realism—I piece together the evolution of Quine’s position by examining the origins of these commitments one by one, showing how his early views gradually evolved into the mature naturalistic position that would have such an enormous impact on post-war analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...) are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object, is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Where “Two Dogmas (...) of Empiricism” is usually considered to be a turning point in Quine’s development, this paper redefines the place of ‘Two Dogmas’ in his oeuvre. Not only does Quine’s book project reveal that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s ; Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective; steps that will be traced in the second half of this paper. (shrink)

Dankzij nieuwe reproductieve technologieën worden de keuzemogelijkheden van wensouders steeds vergroot. Echter, bij deze toegenomen maakbaarheid stuiten we ook op een onvermogen om onze ervaringen aan te passen aan het veranderende culturele en morele landschap, vooral met betrekking tot de waarde van de genetische connectie. In deze bijdrage wil ik stilstaan bij zulke ‘weerbarstige ervaringen’ en de implicaties ervan voor het beleid en de ethiek van ouderschap.

The debate on enhancement ethics cannot escape some of the deeper questions troubling the concept of personhood. That is, in a sentence, my reading of Robert Sparrow’s target article (Sparrow 2022)...

Distrust in scientific experts can be surprisingly stubborn, persisting despite evidence supporting the experts’ views, demonstrations of their competence, or displays of good will. This stubborn distrust is often viewed as a manifestation of irrationality. By contrast, this article proposes a logic of “status distrust”: low-status individuals are objectively vulnerable to collective decision-making, and can justifiably distrust high-status scientific experts if they are not confident that the experts do not have their best interests at heart. In phenomena of status distrust, (...) social status is thus an indicator of distrust, and this has wider implications for the literatures on trust in science and on expert communication. (shrink)

Darwin hypothesized that some animals, when selecting sexual partners, possess a genuine “sense of beauty” that cannot be accounted for by the logic of natural selection. This hypothesis has been notoriously controversial. In this chapter I propose that the concept of agency can be useful to operationalize the “sense of beauty”, and can help identify the conditions under which one can infer that animals are acting as (aesthetic) agents. Focusing on a case study of the behavior of the Pavo cristatus, (...) I identify the types of evidence that would allow for the inference of agency through aesthetic choice. (shrink)

An ideal constructor produces geometry from scratch, modelled through the bottom-up assembly of a graph-like lattice within a space that is defined, bootstrap-wise, by that lattice. Construction becomes the problem of assembling a homogeneous lattice in three-dimensional space; that becomes the problem of resolving geometrical frustration in quasicrystalline structure; achieved by reconceiving the lattice as a dynamical system. The resulting construction is presented as the introductory model sufficient to motivate the formal argument that it is a fundamental structure; based on (...) which, it is proposed that where mathematics’ numbers conventionally correspond to dimensionless points on the stateless number line, numbers more fundamentally correspond to an ordering of discrete objects constructed within the stateful number lattice. A second observation is that this fundamental lattice structure is helically configured with fractal character, which, as it relates to the geometry underlying spacetime, has relevance to questions in physics, particularly those involving wave-particle duality. (shrink)

Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open-minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science”. Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine's naturalism contains a “deep-seated and significant (...) ambivalence”. In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible—a reading that does justice to Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine's position and argue that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine's naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine's naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science-immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting our language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive. (shrink)

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

Biologists explain organisms’ behavior not only as having been programmed by genes and shaped by natural selection, but also as the result of an organism’s agency: the capacity to react to environmental changes in goal-driven ways. The use of such ‘agential explanations’ reopens old questions about how justified it is to ascribe agency to entities like bacteria or plants that obviously lack rationality and even a nervous system. Is organismic agency genuinely ‘real’ or is it just a useful fiction? In (...) this paper we focus on two questions: whether agential explanations are to be interpreted ontically, and whether they can be reduced to non-agential explanations (thereby dispensing with agency). The Kantian approach we identify interprets agential explanations non-ontically, yet holds agency to be indispensable. Attributing agency to organisms is not to be taken literally in the way we attribute physical properties such as mass or acceleration, but nor is it a mere heuristic or predictive tool. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of our own rational capacity: as long as we are rational agents ourselves, we cannot avoid seeing agency in organisms. (shrink)

Quine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...) is a mistake, there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine's argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine's work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence. (shrink)

Quine is routinely perceived as having changed his mind about the scope of the Duhem-Quine thesis, shifting from what has been called an 'extreme holism' to a more moderate view. Where the Quine of 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' argues that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, 42), the later Quine seems to back away from this “needlessly strong statement of holism” (1991, 393). In this paper, I show that the received view is incorrect. I distinguish (...) three ways in which Quine's early holism can be said to be wide-scoped and show that he has never changed his mind about any one of these aspects of his early view. Instead, I argue that Quine's apparent change of mind can be explained away as a mere shift of emphasis. (shrink)