Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

The term “altruism” is used in many ways. In this thesis, I discuss altruism as a motivation, which is an influential notion in philosophy and the social sciences. Questions about the nature and the possibility of altruistic motivation have inspired much debate, both in academia and in everyday conversations. How can we know when we are truly altruistic and when we are merely helping others as a means to some egoistic goal? Are humans even capable of genuine altruistic motivation or (...) are we always egoistic deep down? Before answering questions like these, however, we need to ask a more fundamental question: how should we define altruistic motivation? The standard account of altruistic motivation in the literature defines it as an ultimate desire to increase the welfare of others. The central claim I will argue for in this thesis is that this standard account is intrinsically flawed and should be abandoned. -/- The problem with the standard account of altruistic motivation, in short, is its reliance on the notion of “ultimate desire”, which is a limited and unfruitful way of conceptualizing altruistic motivation. The criticism I propose is based on an interdisciplinary analysis of many aspects of the standard account, discussing its philosophical basis, its use in scientific research, its historical development, and its relation to common sense and morality. -/- This thesis is divided into four parts, each composed of two chapters. Part I presents the many technical accounts of altruism present in the scientific literature, distinguishing the standard account of altruistic motivation from alternative accounts of altruism. I discuss the hypotheses of psychological altruism, which states that some of our ultimate desires aim to increase the welfare of others, and psychological egoism, which states that all of our ultimate desires are egoistic. In this first part, I discuss some of the central philosophical concepts underlying the standard account of altruistic motivation, showing their implications for the debate about psychological altruism. -/- Part II discusses the main arguments for the existence of altruistic motivation. I argue that the main arguments in the scientific literature fail in making a defense of psychological altruism and that the definition of altruistic motivation makes the solution to the debate on psychological altruism virtually impossible. I conclude that the standard account makes altruistic motivation an unverifiable and unfruitful notion for scientific research. -/- Part III discusses the history of altruism and egoism, focusing particularly on early modern philosophy. I argue that the modern accounts of altruism and egoism diverge from the contemporary standard account of altruistic motivation. Reading the debates in modern philosophy through the lens of psychological altruism and psychological egoism oversimplifies and impoverishes the modern debate. I argue that the standard account also fails in representing the original use of “altruism”, proposed by Auguste Comte. In this third part, I show how the use of the standard account of altruistic motivation cannot be based on its historical foundations. -/- Finally, Part IV addresses the normative character of altruism and discusses some alternative ways of conceptualizing altruism. I argue that the standard account of altruistic motivation does not reflect the ordinary use of the term “altruism” and fails in accounting for its normative character. As an alternative, I propose an alternative account of altruism, virtue altruism. I claim that this account better reflects the ordinary intuitions about altruism, accommodates the descriptive and normative dimensions of altruism, is at home with most of the historical accounts of altruism, and may promote the active promotion of altruistic actions. (shrink)

In this article, classic game theory and evolutionary game theory are used to explain how social norms might come into existence. The norm of distributive fairness is taken as a case in point, and illustrated by a simple example of dividing a cake.

What I call "strategic injustice" involves a set of formal and informal regulatory rules and conventions that often lead to grossly unfair outcomes for a class of individuals despite their resistance. My goal in this paper is to provide the necessary conditions for such injustices and for eliminating their instances from our social practices. To do so, I follow Peter Vanderschraaf's analysis of circumstances of justice and expand his account by embedding "asymmetric conflictual coordination games" that summarize fair division problems (...) in a dynamic social network. I use the network effect on such coordination games to explain the emergence of stable exploitative behavior and conventions by a class of individuals even in the presence of restraining efforts by others. I conclude that such unfair conventions are resilient to uncoordinated individual actions and interventions. In fact, maintaining a rough equality itself turns into another coordination problem. Finally, I show that something similar to a social movement that restructures the network of social relations is necessary to solve such coordination problems. (shrink)

Policy and guideline proposals for ethical artificial intelligence research have proliferated in recent years. These are supposed to guide the socially-responsible development of AI for a common good. However, there typically exist incentives for non-cooperation ; and, these proposals often lack effective mechanisms to enforce their own normative claims. The situation just described constitutes a social dilemma—namely, a situation where no one has an individual incentive to cooperate, though mutual cooperation would lead to the best outcome for all involved. In (...) this paper, we use stochastic evolutionary game dynamics to model this social dilemma in the context of the ethical development of artificial intelligence. This formalism allows us to isolate variables that may be intervened upon, thus providing actionable suggestions for increased cooperation amongst numerous stakeholders in AI. Our results show how stochastic effects can help make cooperation viable in such a scenario. They suggest that coordination for a common good should be attempted in smaller groups in which the cost of cooperation is low, and the perceived risk of failure is high. This provides insight into the conditions under which we should expect such ethics proposals to be successful with regard to their scope, scale, and content. (shrink)

Agent-based modelling has become a well-established method in social epistemology and philosophy of science but the question of what kind of explanations these models provide remains largely open. This paper is dedicated to this issue. It starts by distinguishing between real-world phenomena, real-world possibilities, and logical possibilities as different kinds of targets which agent-based models can represent. I argue that models representing the former two kinds provide how-actually explanations or causal how-possibly explanations. In contrast, models that represent logical possibilities provide (...) epistemically opaque how-possibly explanations. While highly idealised ABMs in the form in which they are initially proposed typically fall into the last category, the epistemic opaqueness of explanations they provide can be reduced by validation procedures. To this purpose, an examination of results of simulations in terms of classes of models can be particularly helpful. I illustrate this point by discussing a class of ABMs of scientific interaction and the claim that a high degree of interaction can impede scientific inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss two influential pictures of communication and the relation between them. One picture holds that successful communication requires identity of content: The speaker has a belief that she expresses with her utterance, and the hearer acquires a belief with the same content by understanding the utterance. The second picture was proposed by Lewis in his classic work Convention and then refined in “Languages and Language.” It sees communication as coordination among speakers—a technical notion that Lewis draws (...) from game theory. Samuel Cumming has recently provided an elegant and insightful synthesis of the two pictures, arguing that Lewisian coordination among speakers is in fact a form of content identity. In this paper, my negative goal is to argue against Cumming’s attempt to construe coordination as content identity, showing that it yields incorrect predictions about certain cases of successful communication. My positive goal is to show how we can avoid Cumming’s problematic interpretation of coordination and still do justice to the relevant data within a coordination-based framework. (shrink)

The article investigates what happens when philosophy meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic literature in game theory and network science. Then, we investigate the structure of the two corpora thus identified by bibliographic coupling and divide them into clusters of related papers by automatic (...) community detection. Lastly, we construct by the same bibliometric techniques a reference map of philosophy, on which we overlay our corpora to map the diffusion of game theory and network science in the various sub-areas of recent philosophy. Three main results derive from this study. Philosophers are interested not only in using and investigating game theory as a formal method belonging to applied mathematics and sharing many relevant features with social choice theory, but also in considering its applications in more empirically oriented disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive science, or biology. Philosophers focus on networks in two research contexts and in two different ways: in the debate on causality and scientific explanation, they consider the results of network science; in social epistemology, they employ network science as a formal tool. In the reference map, logic—whose use in philosophy dates back to a much earlier period—is distributed in a more uniform way than recently encountered disciplines such as game theory and network science. We conclude by discussing some methodological limitations of our bibliometric approach, especially with reference to the problem of field delineation. (shrink)

Computational modeling should play a central role in philosophy. In this introduction to our topical collection, we propose a small topology of computational modeling in philosophy in general, and show how the various contributions to our topical collection fit into this overall picture. On this basis, we describe some of the ways in which computational models from other disciplines have found their way into philosophy, and how the principles one found here still underlie current trends in the field. Moreover, we (...) argue that philosophers contribute to computational modeling not only by building their own models, but also by thinking about the various applications of the method in philosophy and the sciences. In this context, we note that models in philosophy are usually simple, while models in the sciences are often more complex and empirically grounded. Bridging certain methodological gaps that arise from this discrepancy may prove to be challenging and fruitful for the further development of computational modeling in philosophy and beyond. (shrink)

What endogenous factors contribute to minority (Red Queen) or majority (Red King) domination under conditions of coercive bargaining? We build on previous work demonstrating minority disadvantage in non-coercive bargaining games to show that under neutral initial conditions, majorities are advantaged in high conflict situations, and minorities are advantaged in low conflict games. These effects are a function of the relationship between (1) relative proportions of the majority and minority groups and (2) costs of conflict. Although both Red King and Red (...) Queen effects can occur, we further show that agents’ increased initial propensity toward conflict advantages majorities. (shrink)

In metasemantics, semantic dispositionalism is the view that what makes it the case that, given the value of the relevant parameters, a certain linguistic expression refers to what it does are the speakers’ dispositions. In the literature, there is something like a consensus that the fate of dispositionalism hinges on the status of three arguments, first put forward by Saul Kripke ‒ or at least usually ascribed to him. This paper discusses a different, and strangely neglected, anti-dispositionalist argument, which develops (...) some remarks first put forward by Paul Boghossian and Anandi Hattiangadi and revolves around the idea that semantic dispositionalists have no way to justify their privileging certain dispositions, the ones they take to be reference-determining, over all the others. After some background (Section 1) and a first presentation of the argument (Section 2), I discuss three ways a dispositionalist might try to answer it and find them all wanting (Section 3). (shrink)

This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is both temporally and explanatorily prior to the use of (...) communicative intentions. After developing these negative points about the place of communicative intentions in detail, I provide a novel alternative account according to which minded communication is characterized in terms of patterns of action and response that function to coordinate the representational mental states of agents. I show that an account which centers on patterns of representational coordination of this sort is well suited to capture the theoretical roles associated with minded communication and that it does so in a way that provides a good fit with comparative facts about the presence of minded communication among non-human animals. (shrink)

What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them to explain seven different (...) types of morality: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Here we explore the conjecture that these simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a much larger number of more complex moral ‘molecules’, and that as such morality is a combinatorial system. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise a candidate moral molecule, and successfully locate an example of it in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. These findings indicate that morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. Thus morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and powerful theory, that explains why there are many moral values, and successfully predicts what they will be; and it generates a systematic framework that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing. (shrink)

Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue that (...) teleosemantics meets the truth-evaluable criterion and is not required to meet the intensionality criterion. We conclude that Hutto and Myin’s objection fails. (shrink)

It is well-known that people will adjust their first-order beliefs based on observations of others. We explore how such adjustments interact with second-order beliefs regarding universalism and relativism in a population. Across a range of simulations, we show that populations where individuals have a tendency toward universalism converge more quickly in coordination problems, and generate higher total payoffs, than do populations where individuals have a tendency toward relativism. Thus, in contexts where coordination is important, belief in universalism is advantageous. However, (...) we also show, across a range of simulations, that universalism will enshrine inequalities and eliminate diversity, and in these cases it seems that relativism has its own advantages. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...) apply to cases where one communicate through spontaneous emotional expressions and how the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

We work with a large spatialized array of individuals in an environment of drifting food sources and predators. The behavior of each individual is generated by its simple neural net; individuals are capable of making one of two sounds and are capable of responding to sounds from their immediate neighbors by opening their mouths or hiding. An individual whose mouth is open in the presence of food is “fed” and gains points; an individual who fails to hide when a predator (...) is present is “hurt” by losing points. Opening mouths, hiding, and making sounds each exact an energy cost. There is no direct evolutionary gain for acts of cooperation or “successful communication” per se. In such an environment we start with a spatialized array of neural nets with randomized weights. Using standard learning algorithms, our individuals “train up” on the behavior of successful neighbors at regular intervals. Given that simple setup, will a community of neural nets evolve a simple language for signaling the presence of food and predators? With important qualifications, the answer is “yes.” In a simple spatial environment, pursuing individualistic gains and using partial training on successful neighbors, randomized neural nets can learn to communicate. (shrink)

This article gives a short presentation of reflexive imperativism, the intentionalist theory of valence I developed with Max Khan Hayward. The theory says that mental states have valence in virtue of having reflexive imperative content. More precisely, mental states have positive valence (i.e., feel good) in virtue of issuing the command "More of me!", and they have negative valence (i.e., feel bad) in virtue of issuing the command "Less of me!" The article summarises the main arguments in favour of reflexive (...) imperativism and against other intentionalist treatments of valence. (shrink)

Human values seem to vary across time and space. What implications does this have for the future of human value? Will our human and (perhaps) post-human offspring have very different values from our own? Can we study the future of human values in an insightful and systematic way? This article makes three contributions to the debate about the future of human values. First, it argues that the systematic study of future values is both necessary in and of itself and an (...) important complement to other future-oriented inquiries. Second, it sets out a methodology and a set of methods for undertaking this study. Third, it gives a practical illustration of what this ‘axiological futurism’ might look like by developing a model of the axiological possibility space that humans are likely to navigate over the coming decades. (shrink)

Bruner shows that in cultural interactions, members of minority groups will learn to interact with members of majority groups more quickly—minorities tend to meet majorities more often as a brute fact of their respective numbers—and, as a result, may come to be disadvantaged in situations where they divide resources. In this paper, we discuss the implications of this effect for epistemic communities. We use evolutionary game theoretic methods to show that minority groups can end up disadvantaged in academic interactions like (...) bargaining and collaboration as a result of this effect. These outcomes are more likely, in our models, the smaller the minority group. They occur despite assumptions that majority and minority groups do not differ with respect to skill level, personality, preference, or competence of any sort. Furthermore, as we will argue, these disadvantaged outcomes for minority groups may negatively impact the progress of epistemic communities. (shrink)

There has recently been an explosion of formal models of signalling, which have been developed to learn about different aspects of meaning. This paper discusses whether that success can also be used to provide an original naturalistic theory of meaning in terms of information or some related notion. In particular, it argues that, although these models can teach us a lot about different aspects of content, at the moment they fail to support the idea that meaning just is some kind (...) of information. As an alternative, I suggest a more modest approach to the relationship between informational notions used in models and semantic properties in the natural world. (shrink)

Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are aligned, not competition problems in which (...) individual interests compete with group interests. In response, I set out to build on those theories and provide a comprehensive naturalistic account of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. My central claim is that social contracts have culturally evolved to solve cooperation problems, which include both coordination and competition problems. I argue that solutions to coordination problems emerge from “within-group” dynamics, while solutions to competition problems result largely from “between-group” dynamics. (shrink)

This paper applies the theoretical criteria laid out by D’Arms et al. to various aspects of evolutionary models of signalling. The question that D’Arms et al. seek to answer can be formulated as follows: Are the models that we use to explain the phenomena in question conceptually adequate? The conceptual adequacy question relates the formal aspects of the model to those aspects of the natural world that the model is supposed to capture. Moreover, this paper extends the analysis of D’Arms (...) et al. by asking the following additional question: Are the models that we use sufficient to explain the phenomena in question? The sufficiency question asks what formal resources are minimally required for the model to get the right results most of the time. (shrink)

Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models (...) in the science of morality has been vastly underappreciated. This omission shall be remedied here, offering a much more positive picture on the contributions modelers made to our understanding of morality. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the issue of compatibility of social institution and convention. At first, it introduces the modest account of conventionality building on five distinctive features – interdependence, arbitrariness, mind-independence, spontaneity, and normative-neutrality – which constitute conventional behaviour, then it presents the two major theories of social institutions that explain them in terms of rules, or equilibria. The argument is that conventions cover a wide-ranging area and cannot be identified with the category of institutions because it would be too (...) restrictive and contradictory to the initial modest account. (shrink)

One curious phenomenon of several social groups is that they are ‘redundant’ in the sense that they contain more cooperators than strictly needed to complete certain group tasks, such as foraging. Redundancy is puzzling because redundant groups are particularly susceptible to invasion by defectors. Yet, redundancy can be found in groups formed by a wide range of organisms, including insects and microbes. Birch has recently argued that coercive behaviours might account for redundancy using insect colonies as a case study. However, (...) microbial examples suggest redundancy can evolve without coercive behaviours. This paper formulates an explanation for redundancy that does not require targeted punishment of defectors; instead, it proposes that redundancy might be due to ignorance. Specifically, it is suggested that redundancy evolves as a by-product of selection when group members have to opt whether to cooperate or not while being blind to the strategies of others. Accordingly, possessing information about the strategies of the group members might undermine rather than facilitate cooperation within groups. 1The Evolution of Redundancy 2Explaining Redundancy via Coercion 3Explaining Redundancy via Ignorance 3.1Cooperation behind the Darwinian veil of ignorance 3.2Modelling group tasks with a public goods game 3.3Group tasks under harsh environments 4Conclusion. (shrink)

The central claim of my paper is that pragmatics has a wider scope of application than has been generally appreciated. In particular, I will argue that many discussions of pragmatics are guilty of a problematic form of provincialism. The provincialism at issue restricts the class of target systems of study to those involving groups of developmentally typical humans (or slightly idealized versions thereof), either explicitly as a matter of principle or implicitly as consequence of how it construes the underlying pragmatic (...) notions. In what follows, I will argue that this kind of provincialism is problematic because there are patterns of non-human animal social interaction that cannot be properly explained without recourse to the theoretical tool-kit of pragmatics. Crucially, rejecting provincialism about pragmatics does not entail that there are not important theoretical differences between human and non-human systems of pragmatics. It does, however, require that our core philosophical theories of social interaction and communication be centered on features independent not merely of those at work in human languages but also of uniquely human features of cognition and sociality more generally. (shrink)

I offer an explanation for why certain sequences of decisions strike us as irrational while others do not. I argue that we have a standing desire to tell flattering yet plausible narratives about ourselves, and that cases of diachronic behavior that strike us as irrational are those in which you had the opportunity to hide something unflattering and failed to do so.

The topic of moral diversity is not only prevalent in contemporary moral and political philosophy, it is also practically relevant. Moral diversity, however, poses a significant challenge for moral theory building. John Thrasher, in his discussion of public reason theory, which includes social contract theory, argues that if one seriously considers the goal of moral constructivism and considerations of representation and stability, then moral diversity poses an insurmountable problem for most public reason theories. I agree with Thrasher that moral diversity (...) poses a significant challenge for orthodox multistage social contract theories. In fact, I even add a further problem for such theories under the assumption of deep moral diversity. Nevertheless, I argue that my recently developed multilevel social contract theory overcomes these problems. I focus on some of the underexplored features of this theory to show that multilevel social contract theory offers one conceptually coherent and plausible way to render social contract theory viable and relevant for modern diverse societies. (shrink)

We use game theoretic models to take an in-depth look at the dynamics of discrimination and academic collaboration. We find that in collaboration networks, small minority groups may be more likely to end up being discriminated against while collaborating. We also find that discrimination can lead members of different social groups to mostly collaborate with in-group members, decreasing the effective diversity of the social network. Drawing on previous work, we discuss how decreases in the diversity of scientific collaborations might negatively (...) affect the progress of epistemic communities. (shrink)

I introduce an extension of the Lewis-Skyrms signaling game, analysed from a dynamical perspective via simple reinforcement learning. In Lewis’ (Convention, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969) conception of a signaling game, salience is offered as an explanation for how individuals may come to agree upon a linguistic convention. Skyrms (Signals: evolution, learning & information, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010a) offers a dynamic explanation of how signaling conventions might arise presupposing no salience whatsoever. The extension of the atomic signaling game examined here—which I (...) will refer to as a salience game—introduces a variable parameter into the atomic signaling game which allows for degrees of salience, thus filling in the continuum between Skyrms’ and Lewis’ models. The model does not presuppose any salience at the outset, but illustrates a process by which accidentally evolved salience is amplified, to the benefit of the players. It is shown that increasing degrees of salience allow populations to avoid sub-optimal pooling equilibria and to coordinate upon conventions more quickly. (shrink)

Current general restrictions on performance-enhancing drugs pose a collective action problem that cannot be solved and bring a variety of adverse consequences for sport. General prohibitions of PEDs are grounded in claims that they violate the integrity of sport. But there are decisive arguments against integrity of sport-based prohibitions of PEDs for elite sport. We defend a harm prevention approach to PED prohibition as an alternative. This position cannot support a general ban on PEDs, since it provides no basis for (...) prohibiting non-harmful PED use. We argue that a harm prevention approach to restricting PEDs is ethically justified, has better prospects of compliance, is consistent with respecting the integrity of sport, and holds at least a modest prospect of resolving the collective action problem around PED restriction. (shrink)

The paper puts forward a new skeptical solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, a solution which revolves around the idea that human communication does not require meaning facts - at least as defined by Kripke. After a brief discussion of the paradox, I explain why I think that Kripkenstein’s solution needs revision and argue that the main goal of a skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox should be that of showing that communication does not require meaning. After that, I offer (...) two arguments for the thesis that communication does not require meaning. The first argument instantiates a rather direct strategy and focuses on the description of a concrete case of communication without meaning. The second one is more indirect in that I start by describing a world in which, although there are meaning facts, communication does not depend on them. The paper’s last section deals with the issue of meaning talk. (shrink)

A central goal of philosophy of perception is to uncover the nature of sensory capacities. Ideally, we would like an account that specifies what conditions need to be met in order for an organism to count as having the capacity to sense or perceive its environment. And on the assumption that sensory states are the kinds of things that can be accurate or inaccurate, a further goal of philosophy of perception is to identify the accuracy conditions for sensory states. In (...) this paper I recommend a novel approach to these core issues, one that draws heavily on game-theoretic treatments of signaling in nature. A benefit of the approach is that it helps us to understand why biologists attribute sensory powers to such a diverse range of organisms, including plants, fungi, and algae. (shrink)

Recent rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have raised many questions about the regulatory and governance mechanisms for autonomous machines. Many commentators, scholars, and policy-makers now call for ensuring that algorithms governing our lives are transparent, fair, and accountable. Here, I propose a conceptual framework for the regulation of AI and algorithmic systems. I argue that we need tools to program, debug and maintain an algorithmic social contract, a pact between various human stakeholders, mediated by machines. To (...) achieve this, we can adapt the concept of human-in-the-loop (HITL) from the fields of modeling and simulation, and interactive machine learning. In particular, I propose an agenda I call society-in-the-loop (SITL), which combines the HITL control paradigm with mechanisms for negotiating the values of various stakeholders affected by AI systems, and monitoring compliance with the agreement. In short, ‘SITL = HITL + Social Contract.’. (shrink)

In interactive situations, agents can “learn” something that is not a preexisting truth. They can converge to an arbitrary convention, or tacit agreement. Once established they may even view it as an objective truth. Here we investigate accommodation dynamics for interpersonal comparisons of utility intervals. We show, for a large class of dynamics, convergence to a convention.

Public reason theories are characterized by three conditions: constructivism, representation, and stability. Constructivism holds that justification does not rely on any antecedent moral or political values outside of the procedure of agreement. Representation holds that the reasons for the choice in the model must be rationally explicable to real agents outside the model. Stability holds that the principles chosen in the procedure should be stable upon reflection, especially in the face of diversity in a pluralistic society. Choice procedures that involve (...) at least two-stages with different information, as Rawls’s theory does, will be path-dependent and not meet the condition of representation since it will not be globally coherent. Attempts to solve this problem without eliminating the segmentation of choice in the procedure will run afoul of constructivism or stability. This problem is instructive because it highlights how public reason theories must evolve in the face of increased concerns about diversity. (shrink)

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks — from the way monkeys in a troop communicate, to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this paper, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his (...) formal measure of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts: they must be difference-makers for acts. (shrink)

Robustness analysis is widespread in science, but philosophers have struggled to justify its confirmatory power. We provide a positive account of robustness by analysing some explicit and implicit uses of within and across-model robustness in evolutionary theory. We argue that appeals to robustness are usually difficult to justify because they aim to increase the likeliness that a phenomenon obtains. However, we show that robust results are necessary for explanations of phenomena with specific properties. Across-model robustness is necessary for how-possibly explanations (...) of multiply instantiated phenomena, while within-model robustness is necessary for explanations of phenomena with multiple evolutionary starting points. In such cases, the appeal of robustness is explanatory rather than confirmatory. (shrink)

What is the function of morality? On this question, something approaching a consensus has recently emerged. Impressed by developments in evolutionary theory, many philosophers now tell us that the function of morality is to reduce social tensions, and to thereby enable a society to efficiently promote the well-being of its members. In this paper, I subject this consensus to rigorous scrutiny, arguing that the functional hypothesis in question is not well supported. In particular, I attack the supposed evidential relation between (...) an evolutionary genealogy of morals and the functional hypothesis itself. I show that there are a great many functionally relevant discontinuities between our own culture and the culture within which morality allegedly emerged, and I argue that this seriously weakens the inference from morality’s evolutionary history to its present-day function. (shrink)

Naturalistic theories of representation seek to specify the conditions that must be met for an entity to represent another entity. Although these approaches have been relatively successful in certain areas, such as communication theory or genetics, many doubt that they can be employed to naturalize complex cognitive representations. In this essay I identify some of the difficulties for developing a teleosemantic theory of cognitive representations and provide a strategy for accommodating them: to look into models of signaling in evolutionary game (...) theory. I show how these models can be used to formulate teleosemantics and expand it in new directions. (shrink)

The ‘phenotypic gambit,’ the assumption that we can ignore genetics and look at the fitness of phenotypes to determine the expected evolutionary dynamics of a population, is often used in evolutionary game theory. However, as this paper will show, an overlooked genotype to phenotype map can qualitatively affect evolution in ways the phenotypic approach cannot predict or explain. This gives us reason to believe that, even in the long-term, correspondences between phenotypic predictions and dynamical outcomes are not robust for all (...) plausible assumptions regarding the underlying genetics of traits. This paper shows important ways in which the phenotypic gambit can fail and how to proceed with evolutionary game theoretic modeling when it does. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

In recent years, many scholars have suggested that the Baldwin effect may play an important role in the evolution of language. However, the Baldwin effect is a multifaceted and controversial process and the assessment of its connection with language is difficult without a formal model. This paper provides a first step in this direction. We examine a game-theoretic model of the interaction between plasticity and evolution in the context of a simple language game. Additionally, we describe three distinct aspects of (...) the Baldwin effect: the Simpson– Baldwin effect, the Baldwin expediting effect and the Baldwin optimizing effect. We find that a simple model of the evolution of language lends theoretical plausibility to the existence of the Simpson– Baldwin and the Baldwin optimizing effects in this arena, but not the Baldwin expediting effect. (shrink)

Mainstream political liberalism holds that legal coercion is permissible only if it is based on reasons that all can share, access or accept. But these requirements are subject to well-known problems. I articulate and defend an intelligible reasons requirement as an alternative. An intelligible reason is a reason that all suitably idealized members of the public can see as a reason for the person who offers it according to that person’s own evaluative standards. It thereby permits reasons into public justification (...) that all cannot share, access, or accept, and so contrasts with standard approaches to public justification. The intelligible reasons requirement has two striking implications. First, it severs the connection between public justification and principles of deliberative restraint. Second, it pushes political liberals to appeal to other political processes to publicly justify law, specifically bargaining, adjudication, and social evolution. (shrink)