We describe a new approach to understanding the functioning of the nervous system, unifying previous ideas of Josephson and Hauser, Baas, and Brooks. Its basis consists in analysing the total developmental process into basic components of development, whose corresponding mechanisms (skill constructors) are organised together into a coherent total system.

The importance of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e. the categories) within Kant’s system of philosophy is undeniable. As I hope to make clear in this essay, however, the categories are also an essential part of Kant’s critique of Christian Wolff. In particular, I argue that Kant’s development of the categories represents a decisive break with the Wolffian conception of the understanding and that this break is central to understanding the task of the Transcendental Analytic. This break, however, is (...) not merely that Kant affirms while Wolff and his followers deny a sharp distinction between sensibility and the understanding, which is the aspect of Kant’s rejection of Wolff that scholars most frequently note. Rather, this break concerns differences in their views about the understanding itself. For while Wolff conceives of the understanding as a mental capacity to extract and make distinct content already present in the senses, Kant conceives of the understanding in its “real use” as a capacity to produce purely intellectual content. (shrink)

“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even inspire (...) jealousy-fueled homicide. How might these perilous devotions be diminished? The ancients thought that treatments such as phlebotomy, exercise, or bloodletting could “cure” an individual of love. But modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses—and misuses—of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise. (shrink)

Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a ‘brain disease’ versus ‘moral weakness’ model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent’s identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person after (...) becoming addicted. Methods: We conducted a series of vignette-based experiments (total N = 3,620) to assess lay attitudes concerning addiction and identity persistence, systematically manipulating key characteristics of agents and their drug of addiction. Conclusions: In Study 1, we found that US participants judged an agent who became addicted to drugs as being closer to ‘a completely different person’ than ‘completely the same person’ as the agent who existed prior to the addiction. In Studies 2-6, we investigated the intuitive basis for this result, finding that lay judgments of altered identity as a consequence of drug use and addiction are driven primarily by perceived negative changes in the moral character of drug users, who are seen as having deviated from their good true selves. (shrink)

Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate a (...) new scale—the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale—to dissociate individual differences in the ‘negative’ (permissive attitude toward instrumental harm) and ‘positive’ (impartial concern for the greater good) dimensions of utilitarian thinking as manifested in the general population. We show that these are two independent dimensions of proto-utilitarian tendencies in the lay population, each exhibiting a distinct psychological profile. Empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and although instrumental harm was associated with subclinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity. Importantly, although these two dimensions were independent in the lay population, they were closely associated in a sample of moral philosophers. Acknowledging this dissociation between the instrumental harm and impartial beneficence components of utilitarian thinking in ordinary people can clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology and its relation to moral philosophy as well as generate fruitful avenues for further research. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on three sets of issues that bear directly on our understanding of Locke and Kant. The first is whether Kant believes Locke merely anticipates his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or also believes Locke anticipates his notion of synthetic a priori cognition. The second is what should we as readers of Kant and Locke should think about Kant’s view whatever it turns out to be, and the third is the nature of Kant’s justification (...) for the comparison he draws between his philosophy and Locke’s. I argue (1) that Kant believes Locke anticipates both the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori cognition, (2) that the best justification for Kant’s claim draws on Locke’s distinction between trifling and instructive knowledge, (3) that the arguments against this claim developed by Carson, Allison, and Newman fail to undermine it, and (4) that Kant’s own justification for his claim is quite different from what many commentators have thought it was (or should have been). (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue (...) that its goal is to establish a set of rules for the use of pure reason that, if followed, will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate our tendency to make judgments about supersensible objects. Since Kant's justification for these rules relies crucially on claims he has defended in the Doctrine of Elements, I argue further that, far from being a dispensable part of the Critique as commentators have tended to claim, the Discipline is, in fact, the culmination of Kant's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...) fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the first Critique in light of the foregoing, and discuss the broader implications of my analysis. (shrink)

Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects (...) of this response. The first is that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is also a response to Hume. The second is that aspects of this response are decidedly positive. In particular, I argue (1) that Kant believed Hume's scepticism manifested important elements of Pyrrhonian scepticism and (2) that both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Hume had a significant positive influence on the development of the Transcendental Dialectic. (shrink)

Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this (...) debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant’s relationship to Hume sketched above. (shrink)

Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation as such (...) a refutation, and (3) that none of Hume’s early German critics provided responses to this account that would have satisfied Kant. Watkins’ reading of Kant’s account of causation is thus more compatible with traditional views about Kant’s relationship to Hume than Watkins believes. (shrink)

Aumann’s theorem states that no individual should agree to disagree under a range of assumptions. Political liberalism appears to presuppose these assumptions with the idealized conditions of public reason. We argue Aumann’s theorem demonstrates they nevertheless cannot be simultaneously held with what is arguably political liberalism’s most central tenet. That is, the tenet of reasonable pluralism, which implies we can rationally agree to disagree over conceptions of the good. We finish by elaborating a way of relaxing one of the theorem’s (...) axioms that arguably lends itself to a coherent account of political liberalism, namely the condition of indexical independence. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is modeled on the Wolffian division of logic textbooks into sections on concepts, judgments, and inferences. While it is undeniable that the Transcendental Logic contains elements that are similar to the content of these sections, I believe these similarities are largely incidental to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In this essay, I offer an alternative and, I believe, more plausible account of Wolff’s influence on the structure of the (...) Transcendental Logic, one that puts the focus on his empirical psychology rather than his logic. In particular, I argue that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is deeply indebted to a conception of purity that Wolff introduces in his empirical psychology and that this conception sheds more light on the overall structure of the Transcendental Logic than the accepted view. In section one, I outline two conceptions of purity found in Kant and trace them to similar views in Wolff. In section two, I turn to Kant’s views about logic as they are expressed in the Critique and argue that it is best to interpret Kant’s taxonomy of logic on its own terms rather than reading it through its terminological similarities to aspects of the Wolffian tradition. In section three, I argue that the second of the two conceptions of purity identified in section one is central to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In doing so, I argue against the widespread view that this section of the Critique is modeled solely on what Kant calls pure general logic as opposed to both pure and applied general logic. I then conclude by briefly reviewing my account and considering some of its broader implications for our understanding of Kant. (shrink)

In “A Reliabilist Solution to the Problem of Promiscuous Bootstrapping”, Hilary Kornblith (2009) proposes a reliabilist solution to the bootstrapping problem. I’m going to argue that Kornblith’s proposal, far from solving the bootstrapping problem, in fact makes the problem much harder for the reliabilist to solve. Indeed, I’m going to argue that Kornblith’s considerations give us a way to develop a quick reductio of a certain kind of reliabilism. Let’s start with a crude statement of the problem. The bootstrapper, call (...) them S, looks at a device D1 that happens to be reliable, though at this stage S doesn’t know this. We assume that S is a reliable reader of devices. S then draws the following conclusions. (shrink)

We consider how an epistemic network might self-assemble from the ritualization of the individual decisions of simple heterogeneous agents. In such evolved social networks, inquirers may be significantly more successful than they could be investigating nature on their own. The evolved network may also dramatically lower the epistemic risk faced by even the most talented inquirers. We consider networks that self-assemble in the context of both perfect and imperfect communication and compare the behaviour of inquirers in each. This provides a (...) step in bringing together two new and developing research programs, the theory of self-assembling games and the theory of network epistemology. (shrink)

This paper develops a new argument from consciousness to theism: the argument from psychophysical harmony. Roughly, psychophysical harmony consists in the fact that phenomenal states are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways. For example, phenomenal states are correlated with behavior and functioning that is justified or rationalized by those very phenomenal states, and phenomenal states are correlated with verbal reports and judgments that are made true by those very phenomenal states. We argue that psychophysical (...) harmony is strong evidence for theism (or, at least, strong evidence against atheism in its standard naturalistic form). (shrink)

Vagueness as Indeterminacy. I defend the traditional view that a vague term is one with an indeterminate denotation from a bevy of recent challenges.

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

Brian C. Ribeiro’s _Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers_ invites us to view the Pyrrhonist tradition as involving all those who share a commitment to the activity of Pyrrhonizing and develops fresh, provocative readings of Sextus, Montaigne, and Hume as radical Pyrrhonizing skeptics.

In this Introduction, I identify seven discrete aspects of attention brought to the fore by by considering the phenomenon of effortless attention: effort, decision-making, action syntax, agency, automaticity, expertise, and mental training. For each, I provide an overview of recent research, identify challenges to or gaps in current attention theory with respect to it, consider how attention theory can be advanced by including current research, and explain how relevant chapters of this volume offer such advances.

I argue with my friends a lot. That is, I offer them reasons to believe all sorts of philosophical conclusions. Sadly, despite the quality of my arguments, and despite their apparent intelligence, they don’t always agree. They keep insisting on principles in the face of my wittier and wittier counterexamples, and they keep offering their own dull alleged counterexamples to my clever principles. What is a philosopher to do in these circumstances? (And I don’t mean get better friends.) One popular (...) answer these days is that I should, to some extent, defer to my friends. If I look at a batch of reasons and conclude p, and my equally talented friend reaches an incompatible conclusion q, I should revise my opinion so I’m now undecided between p and q. I should, in the preferred lingo, assign equal weight to my view as to theirs. This is despite the fact that I’ve looked at their reasons for concluding q and found them wanting. If I hadn’t, I would have already concluded q. The mere fact that a friend (from now on I’ll leave off the qualifier ‘equally talented and informed’, since all my friends satisfy that) reaches a contrary opinion should be reason to move me. Such a position is defended by Richard Feldman (2006a, 2006b), David Christensen (2007) and Adam Elga (forthcoming). This equal weight view, hereafter EW, is itself a philosophical position. And while some of my friends believe it, some of my friends do not. (Nor, I should add for your benefit, do I.) This raises an odd little dilemma. If EW is correct, then the fact that my friends disagree about it means that I shouldn’t be particularly confident that it is true, since EW says that I shouldn’t be too confident about any position on which my friends disagree. But, as I’ll argue below, to consistently implement EW, I have to be maximally confident that it is true. So to accept EW, I have to inconsistently both be very confident that it is true and not very confident that it is true. This seems like a problem, and a reason to not accept EW.. (shrink)

A seventeenth-century scholastic attempt to restrict the truthmaker principle to positive truths.

The dominant approach to the study of dynamic preference is to generate preference change by manipulating aspects of decision-problem presentation (problem description, task procedure, contextual options). The predisposing approach instead manipulates the decision maker’s mental state while holding problem presentation constant. Three illustrative studies are outlined here. The first modified preferences for ambitious consumption by manipulating subjects’ consumption energy. The second modified preferences for immediate consumption by manipulating subjects’ hedonic resources. The third modified preferences for consumption itself by manipulating subjects’ (...) desire proneness. Whereas framing is thought to affect perception, predisposing apparently can affect tastes and so involves a special kind of preference dynamism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRational agents have consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this (...) essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, a... (shrink)

Imagine your mirror‐inverted counterpart on Mirror Earth, a perfect mirror image of Earth. Would her experiences be the same as yours, or would they be phenomenally mirror‐inverted? I argue, first, that her experiences would be phenomenally the same as yours. I then show that this conclusion gives rise to a puzzle, one that I believe pushes us toward some surprising and philosophically significant conclusions about the nature of perception. When you have a typical visual experience as of something to your (...) left, the following three claims seem very plausible: (1) No one could have an experience phenomenally just like yours without thereby having an experience as of something to her left. (2) Your experience is veridical. (3) Your experience doesn't differ from that of your mirror‐inverted counterpart with respect to veridicality. But (1)‐(3) jointly contradict the claim that you and your mirror‐inverted counterpart would have the same experiences. I argue that any viable response to this puzzle will embrace the following disjunction: either there is a degree of independence between perceptual phenomenology and representational content, contrary to popular intentionalist views of perception, or spatial subjectivism is true, where spatial subjectivism is the view that the spatial properties presented in perception are either mind‐dependent or illusory. (shrink)

We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. Epstein (...) explains and challenges the three prevailing traditions about how the social world is made. One tradition takes the social world to be built out of people, much as traffic is built out of cars. A second tradition also takes people to be the building blocks of the social world, but focuses on thoughts and attitudes we have toward one another. And a third tradition takes the social world to be a collective projection onto the physical world. Epstein shows that these share critical flaws. Most fundamentally, all three traditions overestimate the role of people in building the social world: they are overly anthropocentric. Epstein starts from scratch, bringing the resources of contemporary metaphysics to bear. In the place of traditional theories, he introduces a model based on a new distinction between the grounds and the anchors of social facts. Epstein illustrates the model with a study of the nature of law, and shows how to interpret the prevailing traditions about the social world. Then he turns to social groups, and to what it means for a group to take an action or have an intention. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus, these often depend on more than the actions and intentions of group members. (shrink)

Humans typically display hindsight bias. They are more confident that the evidence available beforehand made some outcome probable when they know the outcome occurred than when they don't. There is broad consensus that hindsight bias is irrational, but this consensus is wrong. Hindsight bias is generally rationally permissible and sometimes rationally required. The fact that a given outcome occurred provides both evidence about what the total evidence available ex ante was, and also evidence about what that evidence supports. Even if (...) you in fact evaluate the ex ante evidence correctly, you should not be certain of this. Then, learning the outcome provides evidence that if you erred, you are more likely to have erred low rather than high in estimating the degree to which the ex ante evidence supported the hypothesis that that outcome would occur. (shrink)

A common view among nontheists combines the de jure objection that theism is epistemically unacceptable with agnosticism about the de facto objection that theism is false. Following Plantinga, we can call this a “proper” de jure objection—a de jure objection that does not depend on any de facto objection. In his Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga has produced a general argument against all proper de jure objections. Here I first show that this argument is logically fallacious (it makes subtle probabilistic fallacies (...) disguised by scope ambiguities), and proceed to lay the groundwork for the construction of actual proper de jure objections. (shrink)

After being largely unknown to non-siniphone philosophers, Li Zehou's ideas are gradually being translated into English, but very little has been done on his aesthetics, which he says is the key to his oeuvre. In the first of three sections of this paper, I briefly introduce the reader to Kant's aesthetics through Li's eyes, in which he develops an implicit notion of aesthetic freedom as political vehicle through the notions of subjectivity, universalization, and the unity of the cognitive faculties. In (...) the second section, I introduce Marx's notions of 'human nature as practice' and 'freedom as practice', as outlined in his early manuscripts. I conclude that Marx's politics take free practice as the highest expression of humanity, which is finally, ideally, self-legislating. In the final section, I present Li's interpretation of Marx as a remedy for Kant, introducing some of Li's specialized vocabulary and demonstrating his final synthesis of Kant and Marx in a notion of aesthetic freedom that presupposes political freedom. (shrink)

Three recent books have argued that Keynes’s philosophy, like Wittgenstein’s, underwent a radical foundational shift. It is argued that Keynes, like Wittgenstein, moved from an atomic Cartesian individualism to a more conventionalist, intersubjective philosophy. It is sometimes argued this was caused by Wittgenstein’s concurrent conversion. Further, it is argued that recognising this shift is important for understanding Keynes’s later economics. In this paper I argue that the evidence adduced for these theses is insubstantial, and other available evidence contradicts their claims.

The Protagoras is the touchstone of Socrates’ moral intellectualist stance. The position in a nutshell stipulates that the proper reevaluation of a desire is enough to neutralize it.[1] The implication of this position is that akrasia or weakness of will is not the result of desire (or fear for that matter) overpowering reason but is due to ignorance. -/- Socrates’ eliminativist position on weakness of will, however, flies in the face of the common-sense experience regarding akratic action and thus Aristotle (...) was at pains to render Socrates’ account of moral incontinence intelligible. The key improvement Aristotle makes to Socrates’s model is to underscore that the conditioning of the akratic’s body plays a critical role in determining the power of one’s appetites and, accordingly, the capacity of one to resist the temptations these appetites present for rational evaluation. As Aristotle puts it, “For the incontinent man is like the people who get drunk quickly and on little wine, i.e., on less than most people.” (1151a 3-4). Aristotle presents what I shall call a somatic paradigm (i.e. the drunkard analogy) in order to tackle the problem of akrasia and it is this somatic solution that marks a significant improvement over Socrates’s intellectualist or informational model or so the tradition tells us. -/- In this paper, I wish to push back on the above Aristotelian explanation. I argue that when one fully examines Socrates’ account of weakness of will that Aristotle’s solution is less effective than is traditionally thought. In fact, Socrates can bring Aristotle’s model into his own; just as Aristotle absorbs what is right about Socrates’s model, namely, that akratic action utilizes reason but to a limited degree, Socrates in Meno (77C-78A) develops his own somatic model of weakness of will that connects to the intellectualist paradigm of the Protagoras. To achieve this rapprochement between the two models, I zero in on the description provided by Socrates of those individuals who desire bad things knowing they are bad as “ill-starred” or “bad spirited” (κακοδαίμων ). The “bad-spirited” is the coward and, in contrast to Aristotle’s drunkard, becomes fearful quickly from little danger. This additional somatic component, when connected to Socrates’s position on akrasia in Protagoras adds a new twist to Socrates’s model in the following way: while no one wishes to be ill-starred such that more harm than good will befall one, one may become so as a result of the bad choices one knowingly makes. -/- -/- [1] “After him came Socrates, who spoke better and further about this subject, but even he was not successful. For he used to make the virtues into sciences, and this is impossible. For the sciences all involve reason, and reason is to be found in the intellectual part of the soul. So that all the virtues, according to him arise in the rational part of the soul. The result is that in making the virtues into sciences he is doing away with the nonrational part of the soul and is thereby doing away with passion and character…” (Aristotle, Magna Moralia 1.1. 1182 a15-26). (shrink)

(article sent to participants of the Lindau meeting where a talk on this subject was given) David Bohm suggested that some kind of implicate order underlies the manifest order observed in physical systems, while others have suggested that some kind of mind-like process underlies this order. In the following a more explicit picture is proposed, based on the existence of parallels between spontaneously fluctuating equilibrium states and life processes. Focus on the processes of natural language suggests a picture involving an (...) evolving ensemble of experts, each with its own goals but nevertheless acting in harmony with each other. The details of how such an ensemble might function and evolve can translate into aspects of the world of fundamental physics such as symmetry and symmetry breaking, and can be expected to be the source of explicit models. This picture differs from that of regular physics in that goal-directedness has an important role to play, contrasting with that of the conventional view which implies a meaningless universe. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a Bayesian analysis of the well-known surprise exam paradox. Central to our analysis is a probabilistic account of what it means for the student to accept the teacher's announcement that he will receive a surprise exam. According to this account, the student can be said to have accepted the teacher's announcement provided he adopts a subjective probability distribution relative to which he expects to receive the exam on a day on which he expects not to (...) receive it. We show that as long as expectation is not equated with subjective certainty there will be contexts in which it is possible for the student to accept the teacher's announcement, in this sense. In addition, we show how a Bayesian modeling of the scenario can yield plausible explanations of the following three intuitive claims: (1) the teacher's announcement becomes easier to accept the more days there are in class; (2) a strict interpretation of the teacher's announcement does not provide the student with any categorical information as to the date of the exam; and (3) the teacher's announcement contains less information about the date of the exam the more days there are in class. To conclude, we show how the surprise exam paradox can be seen as one among the larger class of paradoxes of doxastic fallibilism, foremost among which is the paradox of the preface. (shrink)

Comments on Eugenio Petrovich’s book _A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy: Looking Through the Margins_, for the Quantitative Studies of Philosophy workshop at Tilburg, August 21-22 2024.

Applying good inductive rules inside the scope of suppositions leads to implausible results. I argue it is a mistake to think that inductive rules of inference behave anything like 'inference rules' in natural deduction systems. And this implies that it isn't always true that good arguments can be run 'off-line' to gain a priori knowledge of conditional conclusions.

A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences φ and ψ expresses the same proposition iff φ and ψ have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. Stojnić insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and semantic value (...) must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanley’s Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. (shrink)

Wittgenstein asks: “Now what do the words of this language signify?—What is supposed to shew what they signify, if not the kind of use they have?” Might one answer that rhetorical question by giving a compositional semantics for Wittgenstein’s builder language?

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

A recent paper by Tom Stern suggests that Socrates’s philosophical psychology, which emphasizes rational reflection, is superior to Nietzsche’s drive model when explaining human behavior. I argue that Stern’s analysis is wrong on three fronts. First, the models share common, though inverted, features. Second, Stern fails to consider the role of Socrates’s daimon when evaluating Socrates’s philosophy of mind; third, Nietzsche’s model is more warranted. In sum, Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology is a correction of the Socratic.

We present an account of the phenomenon of music based upon the hypothesis that there is a close parallel between the mechanics of life and the mechanics of mind, a key factor in the correspondence proposed being the existence of close parallels between the concepts of gene and musical idea. The hypothesis accounts for the specificity, complexity, functionality and apparent arbitrariness of musical structures. An implication of the model is that music should be seen as a phenomenon of transcendental character, (...) involving aspects of mind as yet unstudied by conventional science. (shrink)

Deontic necessity modals (e.g. 'have to', 'ought to', 'must', 'need to', 'should', etc.) seem to vary in how they interact with negation. According to some accounts, what forces modals like 'ought' and 'should' to outscope negation is their polarity sensitivity -- modals that scope over negation do so because they are positive polarity items. But there is a conflict between this account and a widely assumed theory of if-clauses, namely the restrictor analysis. In particular, the conflict arises for constructions containing (...) a bound pronoun in the if-clause. This note spells out the core conflict. (shrink)

Objective: Compassion has been associated with eudaimonia and prosocial behavior, and has been regarded as a virtue, both historically and cross-culturally. However, the psychological study of compassion has been limited to laboratory settings and/or standard survey assessments. Here, we use an experience sampling method (ESM) to compare naturalistic assessments of compassion with standard assessments, and to examine compassion, its variability, and associations with eudaimonia and prosocial behavior. -/- Methods: Participants took a survey which included standard assessments of compassion and eudaimonia. (...) Then, over four days, they were repeatedly asked about their level of compassion, eudaimonia, and situational factors within the moments of daily life. Finally, prosocial behavior was tested using the Dual Gamble Task and an opportunity to donate task winnings. -/- Results: Analyses revealed within-person associations between ESM compassion and eudaimonia. ESM compassion also predicted eudaimonia at the next ESM time point. While not impervious to situational factors, considerable consistency was observed in ESM compassion in comparison with eudaimonia. Further, ESM compassion along with eudaimonia predicted donating behavior. Standard assessments did not. -/- Conclusion: Consistent with virtue theory, some individual’s reports displayed a probabilistic tendency toward compassion, and ESM compassion predicted ESM eudaimonia and prosocial behavior toward those in need. (shrink)

Many discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the bodily experience of space turn to his opus Phenomenology of Perception, where he most explicitly takes up the theme. Yet in Merleau-Ponty’s own view this treatment, while providing rich and valuable insights into spatial experience, remains unsatisfying: ultimately Phenomenology of Perception does not escape a dualism that, despite the work’s inestimable contributions to the philosophy of embodied experience, situates it within a flawed tradition running back through Husserl, Kant, and Descartes. As Merleau-Ponty himself (...) puts it, “The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction.” 1 Only in his later philosophy, particularly with his development of the ontology of the flesh, did he approach the fulfillment of his goal to leave this distinction and all its Cartesian corollaries behind once and for all. (shrink)

In a recent study, we found a negative association between psychopathy and violence against genetic relatives. We interpreted this result as a form of nepotism and argued that it failed to support the hypothesis that psychopathy is a mental disorder, suggesting instead that it supports the hypothesis that psychopathy is an evolved life history strategy. This interpretation and subsequent arguments have been challenged in a number of ways. Here, we identify several misunderstandings regarding the harmful dysfunction definition of mental disorder (...) as it applies to psychopathy and regarding the meaning of nepotism. Furthermore, we examine the evidence provided by our critics that psychopathy is associated with other disorders, and we offer a comment on their alternative model of psychopathy. We conclude that there remains little evidence that psychopathy is the product of dysfunctional mechanisms. (shrink)

Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended. We call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational drugs and, ultimately, for their timely and appropriate legal regulation. We (...) also call for criminal convictions for nonviolent offenses pertaining to the use or possession of small quantities of such drugs to be expunged, and for those currently serving time for these offenses to be released. In effect, we call for an end to the “war on drugs.”. (shrink)

Like a pack of cigarettes, a library’s philosophy section should have a warning label: “Something you learn here may ruin your life.” Only here can a flip through a book persuade someone to accept an idea without considering its repercussions. The bad side of philosophy that hardly anyone writes about, is that some philosophies cause people to become hobos. When I use the term ‘hobo’, I’m not referring to just any homeless person – that is, I’m not referring to a (...) handicapped person, an alcoholic, or someone else whose homeless situation is a result of his or her misfortune. Rather, by ‘hobo’, I’m specifically referring to a person who has lived by his or her philosophical convictions and is miserable as a result. No one wants his philosophy to lead him under a dark bridge somewhere, draped in a used sleeping bag, his only defense a rusty pocket knife. Rather, he wants the good life. But what is the good life? And how, you may ask, does all this tie into Epicureanism? -/- Around 300 BC, in Greece’s... (shrink)

Nick Bostrom argues that if we accept some plausible assumptions about how the future will unfold, we should believe we are probably not humans. The argument appeals crucially to an indifference principle whose precise content is a little unclear. I set out four possible interpretations of the principle, none of which can be used to support Bostrom’s argument. On the first two interpretations the principle is false, on the third it does not entail the conclusion, and on the fourth it (...) only entails the conclusion given an auxiliary hypothesis that we have no reason to believe. (shrink)

In his insightful and challenging paper, Jonathan Schaffer argues against a distinction I make in The Ant Trap (Epstein 2015) and related articles. I argue that in addition to the widely discussed “grounding” relation, there is a different kind of metaphysical determination I name “anchoring.” Grounding and anchoring are distinct, and both need to be a part of full explanations of how facts are metaphysically determined. Schaffer argues instead that anchoring is a species of grounding. The crux of his argument (...) comes in the last sections of his paper, in his discussion of “exportation,” the relations strategy, and the definitions strategy. I am inclined to agree that Schaffer’s interesting strategies offer the best choices for the philosopher who wants to insist that anchoring is a species of grounding. But both, I will argue, are fatally flawed. I do not take the separation of anchors from grounds lightly, but find the evidence in its favor overwhelming. And once the distinction is made, I find anchoring to be a powerful practical tool in metaphysics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 768-781, November 2019. (shrink)

The arguments for Bayesianism in the literature fall into three broad categories. There are Dutch Book arguments, both of the traditional pragmatic variety and the modern ‘depragmatised’ form. And there are arguments from the so-called ‘representation theorems’. The arguments have many similarities, for example they have a common conclusion, and they all derive epistemic constraints from considerations about coherent preferences, but they have enough differences to produce hostilities between their proponents. In a recent paper, Maher (1997) has argued that the (...) pragmatised Dutch Book arguments are unsound and the depragmatised Dutch Book arguments question begging. He urges we instead use the representation theorem argument as in his (1993). In this paper I argue that Maher’s own argument is question-begging, though in a more subtle and interesting way than his Dutch Book wielding opponents. (shrink)