It is often claimed that surveillance should be proportionate, but it is rarely made clear exactly what proportionate surveillance would look like beyond an intuitive sense of an act being excessive. I argue that surveillance should indeed be proportionate and draw on Thomas Hurka’s work on proportionality in war to inform the debate on surveillance. After distinguishing between the proportionality of surveillance per se, and surveillance as a particular act, I deal with objections to using proportionality as a legitimate ethical (...) measure. From there I argue that only certain benefits and harms should be counted in any determination of proportionality. Finally I look at how context can affect the proportionality of a particular method of surveillance. In conclusion, I hold that proportionality is not only a morally relevant criterion by which to assess surveillance, but that it is a necessary criterion. Furthermore, while granting that it is difficult to assess, that difficulty should not prevent our trying to do so. (shrink)

Despite recent growth in surveillance capabilities there has been little discussion regarding the ethics of surveillance. Much of the research that has been carried out has tended to lack a coherent structure or fails to address key concerns. I argue that the just war tradition should be used as an ethical framework which is applicable to surveillance, providing the questions which should be asked of any surveillance operation. In this manner, when considering whether to employ surveillance, one should take into (...) account the reason for the surveillance, the authority of the surveillant, whether or not there has been a declaration of intent, whether surveillance is an act of last resort, what is the likelihood of success of the operation and whether surveillance is a proportionate response. Once underway, the methods of surveillance should be proportionate to the occasion and seek to target appropriate people while limiting surveillance of those deemed inappropriate. By drawing on the just war tradition, ethical questions regarding surveillance can draw on a long and considered discourse while gaining a framework which, I argue, raises all the key concerns and misses none. (shrink)

There is a long-running debate as to whether privacy is a matter of control or access. This has become more important following revelations made by Edward Snowden in 2013 regarding the collection of vast swathes of data from the Internet by signals intelligence agencies such as NSA and GCHQ. The nature of this collection is such that if the control account is correct then there has been a significant invasion of people's privacy. If, though, the access account is correct then (...) there has not been an invasion of privacy on the scale suggested by the control account. I argue that the control account of privacy is mistaken. However, the consequences of this are not that the seizing control of personal information is unproblematic. I argue that the control account, while mistaken, seems plausible for two reasons. The first is that a loss of control over my information entails harm to the rights and interests that privacy protects. The second is that a loss of control over my information increases the risk that my information will be accessed and that my privacy will be violated. Seizing control of another's information is therefore harmful, even though it may not entail a violation of privacy. Indeed, seizing control of another's information may be more harmful than actually violating their privacy. (shrink)

In this paper I critique the ethical implications of automating CCTV surveillance. I consider three modes of CCTV with respect to automation: manual, fully automated, and partially automated. In each of these I examine concerns posed by processing capacity, prejudice towards and profiling of surveilled subjects, and false positives and false negatives. While it might seem as if fully automated surveillance is an improvement over the manual alternative in these areas, I demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case. In (...) preference to the extremes I argue in favour of partial automation in which the system integrates a human CCTV operator with some level of automation. To assess the degree to which such a system should be automated I draw on the further issues of privacy and distance. Here I argue that the privacy of the surveilled subject can benefit from automation, while the distance between the surveilled subject and the CCTV operator introduced by automation can have both positive and negative effects. I conclude that in at least the majority of cases more automation is preferable to less within a partially automated system where this does not impinge on efficacy. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow (among others) claims that if an autonomous weapon were to commit a war crime, it would cause harm for which no one could reasonably be blamed. Since no one would bear responsibility for the soldier’s share of killing in such cases, he argues that they would necessarily violate the requirements of jus in bello, and should be prohibited by international law. I argue this view is mistaken and that our moral understanding of war is sufficient to determine blame (...) for any wrongful killing done by autonomous weapons. Analyzing moral responsibility for autonomous weapons starts by recognizing that although they are capable of causing moral consequences, they are neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy in the moral sense. As such, their military role is that of a tool, albeit a rather sophisticated one, and responsibility for their use is roughly analogous to that of existing “smart” weapons. There will likely be some difficulty in managing these systems as they become more intelligent and more prone to unpredicted behavior, but the moral notion of shared responsibility and the legal notion of command responsibility are sufficient to locate responsibility for their use. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the distinctive epistemic authority of avowals of propositional attitude, focusing on the case of belief. It is argued that such avowals are expressive of the very mental states they self-ascribe. This confers upon them a limited self-warranting status, and renders them immune to an important class of errors to which paradigm empirical (e.g., perceptual) judgments are liable.

A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...) account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. In contrast to this, we uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity. (shrink)

Kevin Lynch's books are the classic underpinnings of modern urban planning and design, yet they are only a part of his rich legacy of ideas about human purposes and values in built form. City Sense and City Design brings together Lynch's remaining work, including professional design and planning projects that show how he translated many of his ideas and theories into practice. An invaluable sourcebook of design knowledge, City Sense and City Design completes the record of one of the (...) foremost environmental design theorists of our time and leads to a deeper understanding of his distinctively humanistic philosophy. The editors, both former students of Lynch, provide a cogent summary of his career and of the role he played in shaping and transforming the American urban design profession during the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Each of the seven thematic groupings of writings and projects that follow begins with a short introduction explaining their content and their background. The essays in part I focus on the premises of Lynch's work: his novel reading of large-scale built environments and the notion that the design of an urban landscape should be as meaningful and intimate as the natural landscape. In part II, excerpts from Lynch's travel journals reveal his early ideas on how people perceive and interpret their surroundings—ideas that culminated in his seminal work, The Image of the City. This part of the book also presents Lynch's experiments with children and his assessment of environmental-perception research. The examples of both small-scale and large-scale analysis of visual form in part III are followed by three parts on city design. These include Lynch's more theoretical works on complex planning decisions involving both functional (spatial and structural organization) and normative (how the city works in human terms) approaches, articles discussing the principles that guided Lynch's teaching and practice of city design, and descriptions of Lynch's own projects in the Boston area and elsewhere. The book concludes with essays written late in Lynch's career, fantasy pieces describing utopias and offering new design freedoms and scenarios warning of horrifying "cacotopias.". (shrink)

Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...) is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence, I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects, and I use simulations to show how it can explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect. (shrink)

This chapter explores the metaphysical views about higher-order logic held by two individuals responsible for introducing it to philosophy: Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Frege understood a function at first as the remainder of the content of a proposition when one component was taken out or seen as replaceable by others, and later as a mapping between objects. His logic employed second-order quantifiers ranging over such functions, and he saw a deep division in nature between objects and functions. (...) Russell understood propositional functions as what is obtained when constituents of propositions are replaced by variables, but eventually denied that they were entities in their own right. Both encountered contradictions when supposing there to exist as many objects as functions, and both adopted views about the meaningfulness of higher-order discourse that were difficult to state from within their own strictures. (shrink)

This paper details the content and structure of the folk concept of life, and discusses its relevance for scientific research on life. In four empirical studies, we investigate which features of life are considered salient, universal, central, and necessary. Functionings, such as nutrition and reproduction, but not material composition, turn out to be salient features commonly associated with living beings (Study 1). By contrast, being made of cells is considered a universal feature of living species (Study 2), a central aspect (...) of life (Study 3), and our best candidate for being necessary for life (Study 4). These results are best explained by the hypothesis that people take life to be a natural kind subject to scientific scrutiny. (shrink)

This paper develops a problem for conciliationism that is structurally similar to the self-undermining problem but which is immune to most of the solutions offered against it. A popular objection to conciliationism is that it undermines itself. Given the current disagreement among philosophers about conciliationism, conciliationism seems to require rejecting conciliationism. Adam Elga (2010) has influentially argued that this shows that conciliationism is an incoherent method. By recommending its own rejection, conciliationism recommends multiple, incompatible responses to the same body of (...) experience. Many have offered solutions to this problem, including Elga himself. However, there is another undermining problem. When a peer disagrees about their own peerhood, conciliationism can require the rejection of the peer’s peerhood. The result is that conciliationism recommends two incompatible responses to the same body of experience in a way that parallels the original self-undermining problem. But since many, if not all, of the proposed solutions to the original undermining problem depend on distinctive characteristics of conciliationism undermining itself, they cannot apply to a peer undermining themself. I illustrate this by dividing the solutions that have been offered against the self-undermining problem into two categories: self-exempting solutions and non-exempting solutions. I then show how the proposed solutions under each type do not extend to the peer-undermining problem. If that is right, then conciliationism is faced with a more difficult undermining problem than has been so far acknowledged. (shrink)

Many philosophers still countenance senses or meanings in the broadly Fregean vein. However, it is difficult to posit the existence of senses without positing quite a lot of them, including at least one presenting every entity in existence. I discuss a number of Cantorian paradoxes that seem to result from an overly large metaphysics of senses, and various possible solutions. Certain more deflationary and nontraditional understanding of senses, and to what extent they fare better in solving the problems, are also (...) discussed. In the end, it is concluded that one must divide senses into various ramified-orders in order to avoid antinomy, but that the philosophical justification of such orders is, as yet, still somewhat problematic. (shrink)

This paper will aim to accomplish two things to show Luhmann’s and Hegel’s support of language and communication as dependent on culture, but also their differences with respect to how culture is formed in conjunction with the environment. This paper will firstly show how Hegel distinguishes between the imagination and reason in a different manner from Luhmann, as Hegel considers them logically connected while Luhmann considers them as coextensive. Secondly, this paper will show how reason and imagination create culture through (...) the environment via dialectical idealism in Hegel and a poly-contextural constructivist approach in Luhmann. (shrink)

The Lockean Thesis says that you must believe p iff you’re sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must' asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, 'sufficiently confident' refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory—the view that rational requirements are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. Different versions of this theory generate different versions of (...) Lockeanism; moreover, a plausible version of epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations, yielding a new Lockean picture that helps to model and explain the role of beliefs in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the epistemic priorities of your context. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different than many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence. (shrink)

KK is the thesis that if you can know p, you can know that you can know p. Though it’s unpopular, a flurry of considerations has recently emerged in its favour. Here we add fuel to the fire: standard resources allow us to show that any failure of KK will lead to the knowability and assertability of abominable indicative conditionals of the form ‘If I don’t know it, p’. Such conditionals are manifestly not assertable—a fact that KK defenders can easily (...) explain. I survey a variety of KK-denying responses and find them wanting. Those who object to the knowability of such conditionals must either deny the possibility of harmony between knowledge and belief, or deny well-supported connections between conditional and unconditional attitudes. Meanwhile, those who grant knowability owe us an explanation of such conditionals’ unassertability—yet no successful explanations are on offer. Upshot: we have new evidence for KK. (shrink)

There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision (...) using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and Campbell-Moore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection. (shrink)

Existential theorists have been working to syncretize philosophy, science, and spirituality since shortly after Galileo unknowingly initiated the schism between them. Contemporary philosophers, scientists, and theologians are still engaged in this effort, but have little to show for nearly four centuries of effort. The thesis of this article is that—despite their cooperative intentions—these theorists continue to talk past each other, due to an unacknowledged disagreement on the meaning of their overlapping terms of art. To effectively unify the divergent existential insights (...) of philosophy, science, theism, and spirituality, it will be necessary to return to first principles. To establish an integration baseline, this article defines a diverse collection of philosophical, scientific, theistic, and spiritual expressions, in a unifying vocabulary. (shrink)

Most philosophers have largely downplayed any relevance of multiple meanings of the folk concept of truth in the empirical domain. However, confusions about what truth is have surged in political and everyday discourse. In order to resolve these confusions, we argue that we need a more accurate picture of how the term ‘true’ is in fact used. Our experimental studies reveal that the use of ‘true’ shows substantial variance within the empirical domain, indicating that ‘true’ is ambiguous between a correspondence (...) and a coherence reading. We then explore the consequences of these results for the project of re-engineering truth. (shrink)

Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...) of predicated properties (striking vs. neutral). We discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and whether and in which ways these effects might introduce biased beliefs into social networks. (shrink)

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to vindicate both (1) and (2). But diagnosing why this is so leads to (...) a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology. (shrink)

This paper is about guessing: how people respond to a question when they aren’t certain of the answer. Guesses show surprising and systematic patterns that the most obvious theories don’t explain. We argue that these patterns reveal that people aim to optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity when forming their guess. After spelling out our theory, we use it to argue that guessing plays a central role in our cognitive lives. In particular, our account of guessing yields new theories (...) of belief, assertion, and the conjunction fallacy—the psychological finding that people sometimes rank a conjunction as more probable than one of its conjuncts. More generally, we suggest that guessing helps explain how boundedly rational agents like us navigate a complex, uncertain world. (shrink)

Of the dozens of purported solutions to the liar paradox published in the past fifty years, the vast majority are "traditional" in the sense that they reject one of the premises or inference rules that are used to derive the paradoxical conclusion. Over the years, however, several philosophers have developed an alternative to the traditional approaches; according to them, our very competence with the concept of truth leads us to accept that the reasoning used to derive the paradox is sound. (...) That is, our conceptual competence leads us into inconsistency. I call this alternative the inconsistency approach to the liar. Although this approach has many positive features, I argue that several of the well-developed versions of it that have appeared recently are unacceptable. In particular, they do not recognize that if truth is an inconsistent concept, then we should replace it with new concepts that do the work of truth without giving rise to paradoxes. I outline an inconsistency approach to the liar paradox that satisfies this condition. (shrink)

Presents the results of our study comparing two different approaches (those of Goodwin and Darley 2008, and Sarkissian et al. 2011) to empirically measuring people's belief in moral objectivity. Examines the relationship between belief in moral objectivity and two other metaethical attitudes: belief in moral progress and belief in a just world.

This is a review article on Franz Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology published in 1982. We provide a detailed exposition of Brentano’s work on this topic, focusing on the unity of consciousness, the modes of connection and the types of part, including separable parts, distinctive parts, logical parts and what Brentano calls modificational quasi-parts. We also deal with Brentano’s account of the objects of sensation and the experience of time.

The Twin Earth thought experiment invites us to consider a liquid that has all of the superficial properties associated with water (clear, potable, etc.) but has entirely different deeper causal properties (composed of “XYZ” rather than of H2O). Although this thought experiment was originally introduced to illuminate questions in the theory of reference, it has also played a crucial role in empirically informed debates within the philosophy of psychology about people’s ordinary natural kind concepts. Those debates have sought to accommodate (...) an apparent fact about ordinary people’s judgments: Intuitively, the Twin Earth liquid is not water. We present results from four experiments showing that people do not, in fact, have this intuition. Instead, people tend to have the intuition that there is a sense in which the liquid is not water but also a sense in which it is water. We explore the implications of this finding for debates about theories of natural kind concepts, arguing that it supports views positing two distinct criteria for membership in natural kind categories – one based on deeper causal properties, the other based on superficial, observable properties. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our (...) operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts. (shrink)

You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. I defend three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is (...) not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition---that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions---is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers---but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it. (shrink)

Do people tend to be overconfident? Many think so. They’ve run studies on whether people are calibrated: whether their average confidence in their opinions matches the proportion of those opinions that are true. Under certain conditions, people are systematically ‘over-calibrated’—for example, of the opinions they’re 80% confident in, only 60% are true. From this empirical over-calibration, it’s inferred that people are irrationally overconfident. My question: When and why is this inference warranted? Answering it requires articulating a general connection between being (...) rational and being right—something extant studies have not done. I show how to do so using the notion of deference. This provides a theoretical foundation for calibration research, but also reveals a flaw: the connection between being rational and being right is much weaker than is standardly assumed, since rational people can often be expected to be miscalibrated. Thus we can’t test whether people are overconfident by simply testing whether they are over-calibrated; instead, we must try to predict the rational deviations from calibration, and then compare those predictions to people’s performance. I show how this can be done—and that doing so complicates the interpretation of robust empirical effects. (shrink)

A classic debate concerns whether reasonableness should be understood statistically (e.g., reasonableness is what is common) or prescriptively (e.g., reasonableness is what is good). This Article elaborates and defends a third possibility. Reasonableness is a partly statistical and partly prescriptive “hybrid,” reflecting both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Experiments reveal that people apply reasonableness as a hybrid concept, and the Article argues that a hybrid account offers the best general theory of reasonableness. -/- First, the Article investigates how ordinary people judge (...) what is reasonable. Reasonableness sits at the core of countless legal standards, yet little work has investigated how ordinary people (i.e., potential jurors) actually make reasonableness judgments. Experiments reveal that judgments of reasonableness are systematically intermediate between judgments of the relevant average and ideal across numerous legal domains. For example, participants’ mean judgment of the legally reasonable number of weeks’ delay before a criminal trial (ten weeks) falls between the judged average (seventeen weeks) and ideal (seven weeks). So too for the reasonable num- ber of days to accept a contract offer, the reasonable rate of attorneys’ fees, the reasonable loan interest rate, and the reasonable annual number of loud events on a football field in a residential neighborhood. Judgment of reasonableness is better predicted by both statistical and prescriptive factors than by either factor alone. -/- This Article uses this experimental discovery to develop a normative view of reasonableness. It elaborates an account of reasonableness as a hybrid standard, arguing that this view offers the best general theory of reasonableness, one that applies correctly across multiple legal domains. Moreover, this hybrid feature is the historical essence of legal reasonableness: the original use of the “reasonable person” and the “man on the Clapham omnibus” aimed to reflect both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Empirically, reasonableness is a hybrid judgment. And normatively, reasonableness should be applied as a hybrid standard. (shrink)

Affect-based theorists and life satisfaction theorists disagree about the nature of happiness, but agree about this methodological principle: a philosophical theory of happiness should be in line with the folk concept HAPPINESS. In this article, we present two empirical studies indicating that it is affect-based theories that get the folk concept HAPPINESS right: competent speakers judge a person to be happy if and only if that person is described as feeling pleasure/good most of the time. Our studies also show that (...) the judgement that a person is feeling pleasure/good most of the time reliably brings about the judgement that they are satisfied with their life, even if that person is described as not satisfied. We suggest that this direct causal relation between the concepts POSITIVE AFFECT and LIFE SATISFACTION might explain why many philosophers have been attracted to life satisfaction theories. (shrink)

Le modèle unificationniste de l’explication métaphysique, basé sur les travaux de Kitcher sur l’explication scientifique, offre une alternative intéressante aux modèles présumant la conception supportive de l’explication métaphysique [backing model]. Par contre, le caractère adéquat de ce modèle, i.e. sa capacité à classifier comme métaphysiquement explicative/non-explicative des propositions qui préthéoriquement sont classés comme tel, n’a pas encore été exploré. Pour ce faire, des interprétations pour les relations de détermination et d’appartenance à un ensemble sont fournies. Celles-ci étant potentiellement sujette au (...) problème d’artificialité, i.e. présence d’un biais structurel favorisant l’attribution du caractère explicatif, une réponse est offerte. En effet, le modèle unificationniste permet d’identifier les patrons argumentatifs pouvant être légitimement mis en compétition en comparant la distance entre les ensembles de faits qui doivent être considérés comme vrais dans la formulation d’un patron argumentatif. Cette propriété a des conséquences intéressantes dans l’identification du niveau adéquat de débat entre des propositions compétitrices. (shrink)

Assertions are the centre of gravity in social epistemology. They are the vehicles we use to exchange information within scientific groups and society as a whole. It is therefore essential to determine under which conditions we are permitted to make an assertion. In this paper we argue and provide empirical evidence for the view that the norm of assertion is justified belief: truth or even knowledge are not required. Our results challenge the knowledge account advocated by, e.g. Williamson (1996), in (...) general, and more specifically, put into question several studies conducted by Turri (2013, 2016) that support a knowledge norm of assertion. Instead, the justified belief account championed by, e.g. Douven (2006), seems to prevail. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars for images. (...) Images can have rich syntactic structure, though of a markedly different form than sentences in language. (shrink)

Attempts to evaluate a belief or argument on the basis of its cause or origin are usually condemned as committing the genetic fallacy. However, I sketch a number of cases in which causal or historical factors are logically relevant to evaluating a belief, including an interesting abductive form that reasons from the best explanation for the existence of a belief to its likely truth. Such arguments are also susceptible to refutation by genetic reasoning that may come very close to the (...) standard examples given of supposedly fallacious genetic reasoning. (shrink)

“Experimental jurisprudence” draws on empirical data to inform questions typically associated with jurisprudence or legal theory. Scholars in this flourishing movement conduct empirical studies about a variety of legal language and concepts. Despite the movement’s growth, its justification is still opaque. Jurisprudence is the study of deep and longstanding theoretical questions about law’s nature, but “experimental jurisprudence,” it might seem, simply surveys laypeople. This Article elaborates and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is not only consistent with traditional jurisprudence; (...) it is an essential branch of it. (shrink)

The paper seeks to develop an account of indexical phenomena based on the highly general theory of structure and dependence set forth by Husserl in his Logical Investigations. Husserl here defends an Aristotelian theory of meaning, viewing meanings as species or universals having as their instances certain sorts of concrete meaning acts. Indexical phenomena are seen to involve the combination of such acts of meaning with acts of perception, a thesis here developed in some detail and contrasted with accounts of (...) indexicals suggested by Frege, Wittgenstein and by the later Husserl himself in his Ideas I. Implications are drawn also for our understanding of the categorial grammar sketched by Husserl in his 4th Logical Investigation, as also for our understanding of the nature of proper names and other candidate indexical expressions. (shrink)

Sosa, Pritchard, and Vogel have all argued that there are cases in which one knows something inductively but does not believe it sensitively, and that sensitivity therefore cannot be necessary for knowledge. I defend sensitivity by showing that inductive knowledge is sensitive.

Through a series of empirical studies involving native speakers of English, German, and Chinese, this paper reveals that the predicate “true” is inherently ambiguous in the empirical domain. Truth statements such as “It is true that Tom is at the party” seem to be ambivalent between two readings. On the first reading, the statement means “Reality is such that Tom is at the party.” On the second reading, the statement means “According to what X believes, Tom is at the party.” (...) While there appear to exist some cross-cultural differences in the interpretation of the statements, the overall findings robustly indicate that “true” has multiple meanings in the realm of empirical matters. (shrink)

Grounding pluralism is the view that there are multiple kinds of grounding. In this essay, I motivate and defend an explanation-theoretic view of grounding pluralism. Specifically, I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: why-grounding—which tells us why things are the case—and how-grounding—which tells us how things are the case.

In a recent paper, Melchior pursues a novel argumentative strategy against the sensitivity condition. His claim is that sensitivity suffers from a ‘heterogeneity problem:’ although some higher-order beliefs are knowable, other, very similar, higher-order beliefs are insensitive and so not knowable. Similarly, the conclusions of some bootstrapping arguments are insensitive, but others are not. In reply, I show that sensitivity does not treat different higher-order beliefs differently in the way that Melchior states and that while genuine bootstrapping arguments have insensitive (...) conclusions, the cases that Melchior describes as sensitive ‘bootstrapping’ arguments don’t deserve the name, since they are a perfectly good way of getting to know their conclusions. In sum, sensitivity doesn’t have a heterogeneity problem. (shrink)

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories of self-deception give no support to (...) the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. (shrink)

Mental capacities for perceiving, remembering, thinking, and planning involve the processing of structured mental representations. A compositional semantics of such representations would explain how the content of any given representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their mode of combination. While many have argued that semantic theories of mental representations would have broad value for understanding the mind, there have been few attempts to develop such theories in a systematic and empirically constrained way. This paper contributes to (...) that end by developing a semantics for a ‘fragment’ of our mental representational system: the visual system’s representations of the bounding contours of objects. At least three distinct kinds of composition are involved in such representations: ‘concatenation’, ‘feature composition’, and ‘contour composition’. I sketch the constraints on and semantics of each of these. This account has three principal payoffs. First, it models a working framework for compositionally ascribing structure and content to perceptual representations, while highlighting core kinds of evidence that bear on such ascriptions. Second, it shows how a compositional semantics of perception can be compatible with holistic, or Gestalt, phenomena, which are often taken to show that the whole percept is ‘other than the sum of its parts’. Finally, the account illuminates the format of a key type of perceptual representation, bringing out the ways in which contour representations exhibit domain-specific form of the sort that is typical of structured icons such as diagrams and maps, in contrast to typical discursive representations of logic and language. (shrink)

Stubborn belief, like self-deception, is a species of motivated irrationality. The nature of stubborn belief, however, has not been investigated by philosophers, and it is something that poses a challenge to some prominent accounts of self-deception. In this paper, I argue that the case of stubborn belief constitutes a counterexample to Alfred Mele’s proposed set of sufficient conditions for self-deception, and I attempt to distinguish between the two. The recognition of this phenomenon should force an amendment in this account, and (...) should also make a Mele-style deflationist think more carefully about the kinds of motivational factors operating in self-deception. (shrink)

Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...) to be the actual cause. Second, the impact of temporal location on causal selection is almost canceled out if the later agent did not violate a norm while the former did. We argue that this is due to the impact that judgments of norm violation have on causal selection—even if the violated norm has nothing to do with the obtaining effect. Third, moral judgments about the effect influence causal selection even in the case in which agents could not have foreseen the effect and did not intend to bring it about. We discuss our findings in connection to recent theories of the role of moral judgment in causal reasoning, on the one hand, and to probabilistic models of temporal location, on the other. (shrink)

An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle (...) of the ridge. More specific structural claims of this sort are a guide to how mental states fall within broader representational kinds. Moreover, these claims have significant implications of their own about semantic, functional, and epistemic features of our mental lives. But what are the conditions on a mental state's having one type of constituent structure rather than another? Drawing on explanatory strategies in vision science, I argue that, other things being equal, the constituent structure of a mental state determines what I call its distributional properties—namely, how mental states of that type can, cannot, or must co‐occur with other mental states in a given system. Distributional properties depend critically on and are informative about the underlying structures of mental states, they abstract in important ways from aspects of how mental states are processed, and they can yield significant insights into the variegation of psychological capacities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAndrew Bacon, Matti Eklund, and Patrick Greenough have individually proposed objections to the project in my book, Replacing Truth. Briefly, the book outlines a conceptual engineering project – our defective concept of truth is replaced for certain purposes with a team of concepts that can do some of the jobs we thought truth could do. Here, I respond to their objections and develop the views expressed in Replacing Truth in various ways.

Alfred Mele's deflationary account of self-deception has frequently been criticised for being unable to explain the “tension” inherent in self-deception. These critics maintain that rival theories can better account for this tension, such as theories which suppose self-deceivers to have contradictory beliefs. However, there are two ways in which the tension idea has been understood. In this article, it is argued that on one such understanding, Mele's deflationism can account for this tension better than its rivals, but only if we (...) reconceptualize the self-deceiver's attitude in terms of unwarranted degrees of conviction rather than unwarranted belief. This new way of viewing the self-deceiver's attitude will be informed by observations on experimental work done on the biasing influence of desire on belief, which suggests that self-deceivers don’t manage to fully convince themselves of what they want to be true. On another way in which this tension has been understood, this account would not manage so well, since on this understanding the self-deceiver is best interpreted as knowing, but wishing to avoid, the truth. However, it is argued that we are under no obligation to account for this since it is a characteristic of a different phenomenon than self-deception, namely, escapism. (shrink)

Abstract: From familiar concepts like TALL and TABLE to exotic ones like GRAVITY and GENOCIDE, they guide our lives and are the basis for how we represent the world. However, there is good reason to think that many of our most cherished concepts, like TRUTH, FREEDOM, KNOWLEDGE, and RATIONALITY are defective in the sense that the rules for using them are inconsistent. This defect leads those who possess these concepts into paradoxes and absurdities. Indeed, I argue that many of the (...) central problems of contemporary philosophy should be thought of as having their source in philosophical concepts that are defective in this way. If that is right, then we should take a more active role in crafting and sculpting our conceptual repertoire. We need to explore various ways of replacing these defective concepts with ones that will still do the work we need them to do without leading us into contradictions. (shrink)

Practices – specific, recurrent types of human action and activity – are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure for understanding human practices, and argues that practice theory should be the analytical centrepiece of social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. -/- What would social scientists’ research look like if they took these insights seriously? To (...) answer this question, the book offers an analytical framework to guide empirical research on practices in different times and places. The author explores how practices can be identified, characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts and how they might change over time and space. -/- The Constitution of Social Practices lies at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, cultural theory and the social sciences. It is essential reading for scholars in social theory and the philosophy of social science, as well as the broad range of researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities whose work stands to benefit from serious consideration of practices. (shrink)