In response to our critics, we clarify and defend key ideas in the report Open and Inclusive: Fair Processes for Financing Universal Health Coverage. First, we argue that procedural fairness has greater value than Dan Hausman allows. Second, we argue that the Report aligns with John Kinuthia’s view that a knowledgeable public and a capable civil society, alongside good facilitation, are important for effective public deliberation. Moreover, we agree with Kinuthia that the Report’s framework for procedural fairness applies not merely (...) within the health sector, but also to the wider budget process. Third, we argue that while Dheepa Rajan and Benjamin Rouffy-Ly are right that robust processes for equal participation are often central to a fair process, sometimes improvements in other aspects of procedural fairness, such as transparency, can take priority over strengthening participation. Fourth, while we welcome Sara Bennett and Maria Merritt’s fascinating use of the Report’s principles of procedural fairness to assess the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, we argue that their application of the Report’s principle of equality to development partners’ decision-making requires further justification. (shrink)

We summarize key messages from the World Bank report Open and Inclusive: Fair Processes for Financing Universal Health Coverage. A central lesson of the Report is that in decision-making on the path to UHC, procedural fairness matters alongside substantive fairness. Decision systems should be assessed using a complete conception of procedural fairness that embodies core commitments to impartial and equal consideration of interests and perspectives. These commitments demand that comprehensive information is gathered and disclosed and that justifications for policies are (...) publicly debated; that participation in decision-making is enabled; and that these characteristics of the decision system are institutionalised rather than up to the good will of decision-makers. Procedural fairness can improve equity in outcomes, raise legitimacy and trust, and can help make reforms last. While improving procedural fairness can be costly and there are barriers to achieving it, the range of instruments that countries at varying levels of income and institutional capacity have used with some success shows that, in many contexts, advances in procedural fairness in health financing are possible and worthwhile. (shrink)

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always (...) includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor emotional content, but rather the fact that ‘chink’ is lexically marked as belonging to different registers than ‘Chinese’. It is, moreover, partly such facts which makes slurring ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

In emotion research, both conceptual analyses and empirical studies commonly rely on emotion reports. But what do people mean when they say that they are angry, afraid, joyful, etc.? Building on extant theories of emotion, this paper presents four new studies (including a pre-registered replication) measuring the weight of cognitive evaluations, bodily changes, and action tendencies in people’s use of emotion concepts. The results of these studies suggest that the presence or absence of cognitive evaluations has the largest impact on (...) people’s emotion attributions, and that bodily changes and action tendencies are considered to depend on cognitive evaluations. Implications for theories of emotion (concepts) and the interpretation of emotion reports are discussed. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, David Chalmers introduced the meta-problem of consciousness as “the problem of explaining why we think consciousness poses a hard problem” (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). A solution to the meta-problem could shed light on the hard problem of consciousness. In particular, it would be relevant to elucidate whether people’s problem intuitions (i.e. intuitions holding that conscious experience cannot be reduced to physical processes) are driven by factors related to the nature of consciousness, or rather (...) by factors that are independent of consciousness. Whether people hold problem intuitions, and what factors drive those intuitions, are largely empirical questions. However, there is a lack of empirical research on these issues to date. The results of four studies will show that (1) problem intuitions are not widespread, and (2) when they arise, they do so because of factors that are unrelated to the nature of consciousness. This suggests that consciousness is, after all, not so problematic. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como propósito criticar y reformular la teoría de valores del autor y filósofo argentino Risieri Frondizi. Para ello, se someterán a falsacionismo las tesis según las cuales la cualidad estructural es, primero, estructuralista y no analítica y, segundo, empírica, de acuerdo con la metodología holista de la ciencia. La crítica, así, se desarrollará a partir de los siguientes interrogantes. Inicialmente, ¿el autor acude al holismo o al reduccionismo como enfoques metodológicos de desarrollo? Finalmente, ¿cuál es la (...) distinción lógica entre el valor como cualidad sui géneris y el valor como cualidad estructural? (shrink)

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that (...) emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way. (shrink)

Husserl’s theory of types is most often associated with his account of perception. Here, types operate as pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception of objects. In this paper, I will argue that Husserl’s theory of types is also central to his account of intersubjectivity. More specifically, I will show that a foundational kind of typical subjectivity is entailed by his discussion of the sphere of ownness. It is by way of this type that even a solitary subject can (...) tacitly anticipate the possibility of other subjects. It is also this type that is enriched through interactions between actual subjects. (shrink)

For Austin, Grice, and many others, undertaking a speech act like asserting or promising requires uttering something with a particular sense and reference in mind. We argue that the phenomenon of open-ended promises reveals this 'Locutionary Thesis' to be mistaken.

The term ‘coherence’ (and its antonym ‘incoherence’) is used in a bewildering variety of ways in epistemology (and in philosophy more broadly). This entry attempts to bring some discipline to uses of the term by offering a taxonomy of notions of coherence (and incoherence), and then surveying which of the resulting notions is (or should be) at work in the various different contexts in which it is deployed.

Many believe that we ought to save a large number from being permanently bedridden rather than save one from death. Many also believe that we ought to save one from death rather than a multitude from a very minor harm, no matter how large this multitude. I argue that a principle I call “Aggregate Relevant Claims” satisfactorily explains these judgments. I offer a rationale for this principle and defend it against objections.

Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behavior. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to avoid the spread of the virus include costly behaviors such as self-quarantining or drastically diminishing social contacts. Compliance (or lack thereof) with these recommendations is a controversial and divisive topic, and lay hypotheses abound regarding what underlies this divide. This paper investigates which cognitive, moral, and emotional traits separate people who comply with official recommendations from those who don't. In (...) four studies (three pre-registered) on both U.S. and French samples, we found that individuals' self-reported compliance with official recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic was partly driven by individual differences in moral values, disgust sensitivity, and psychological reactance. We discuss the limitations of our studies and suggest possible applications in the context of health communication. (shrink)

Can we experience emotion without the feeling of accelerated heartbeats, perspiration, or other changes in the body? In his paper “What is an emotion”, William James famously claimed that “if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind” (1884, p. 193). Thus, bodily changes are essential to emotion. This is known as the Subtraction Argument. The Subtraction Argument is still (...) used to support Embodied theories of emotion. Proponents of Disembodied theories, however, have different intuitions regarding the role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. In order to advance this debate, I conducted a series of studies testing people’s intuitions regarding the Subtraction Argument. Results show that, against James’ claims, most people consider that their hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) emotions persist in the absence of bodily feelings. Furthermore, Study 1 found that participants’ responses were not related to individual differences in reflection or interoceptive awareness. These results pose a problem for Embodied theories of emotion and challenge extant explanations for the persistence of emotional experience in cases of impaired interoception. (shrink)

The foundations of research ethics are riven with fault lines emanating from a fear that if research is too closely connected to weighty social purposes an imperative to advance the common good through research will justify abrogating the rights and welfare of study participants. The result is an impoverished conception of the nature of research, an incomplete focus on actors who bear important moral responsibilities, and a system of ethics and oversight highly attuned to the dangers of research but largely (...) silent about threats of ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable medical practices and health systems. -/- In For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics, Alex John London defends a conception of the common good that grounds a moral imperative with two requirements. The first is to promote research that generates the information necessary to enable key social institutions to effectively, efficiently, and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals. The second is to ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors' moral claims to be treated as free and equal. Connecting research to the goals of a just social order grounds a framework for assessing and managing research risk that reconciles these requirements and justifies key oversight practices in non-paternalistic terms. Reconceiving research ethics as resolving coordination problems and providing credible assurance that these requirements are being met expands the issues and actors that fall within the purview of the field and provides the foundation for a more unified and coherent approach to domestic and international research. -/- This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. (shrink)

When one visually hallucinates, the object of one’s hallucination is not before one’s eyes. On the standard view, that is because the object of hallucination does not exist, and so is not anywhere. Many different defenses of the standard view are on offer; each have problems. This paper defends the view that there is always an object of hallucination—a physical object, sometimes with spatiotemporally scattered parts.

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)

Discussions of aesthetic reasons and normativity are becoming increasingly popular. This piece outlines six basic questions about aesthetic reasons, normativity, and value and discusses the space of possible answers to these questions. I divide the terrain into two groups of three questions each. First are questions about the shape of aesthetic reasons: what they favour, how strong they are, and where they come from. Second are relational questions about how aesthetic reasons fit into the wider normative landscape: whether they are (...) distinctive, what their normative status is, and how they interact with each other and with non-aesthetic reasons. This piece aims to provide a taxonomy to clarify and organise the burgeoning literature and to make a few concrete suggestions for avenues of future research. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 343-363, March 2022.

In this study, we examine the philosophical bases of one of the leading clinical psychological methods of therapy for anxiety, anger, and depression, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). We trace this method back to its philosophical roots in the Stoic, Buddhist, Taoist, and Existentialist philosophical traditions. We start by discussing the tenets of CBT, and then we expand on the philosophical traditions that ground this approach. Given that CBT has had a clinically measured positive effect on the psychological well-being of individuals, (...) it becomes important to study the philosophical foundations on which this therapy is based. (shrink)

When A utters a declarative sentence in a context to B, typically A can mean a proposition by the sentence, the sentence in context literally expresses a proposition, there are propositions A and B can agree the sentence literally expressed, and B can acquire knowledge from this testimonial exchange. In recent work on linguistic communication, each of these four platitudes has been challenged, and on the same basis: viz. on the ground that exactly which proposition the sentence expressed in context (...) is not discernible given the information provided by the context. I argue that, even if this is true, there will be propositional parts of the proposition expressed by the sentence in context which can be identified and that, consequently, the partial understanding afforded by the existence of such identifiable parts undermines the soundness of the arguments against the platitudes. (shrink)

Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This paper argues that they are wrong. The orthodox view is that the category *woman* is a social category, like the categories *widow* and *police officer*, although exactly what this social category consists in is a matter of considerable disagreement. In any event, orthodoxy has it that *woman* is definitely not a biological category, like the categories *amphibian* or (...) *adult human female*. -/- In the first part, a number of arguments are given for the view that women are adult human females; the second part turns to rebutting the main objections. Finally, a couple of morals are briefly noted: one for activist sloganeering, and one for ameliorative projects that seek to change the meaning of ‘woman’. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation of (...) mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

The syllogism and the predicate calculus cannot account for an ontological argument in Descartes' Fifth Meditation and related texts. Descartes' notion of god relies on the analytic-synthetic distinction, which Descartes had identified before Leibniz and Kant did. I describe how the syllogism and the predicate calculus cannot explain Descartes' ontological argument; then I apply the analytic-synthetic distinction to Descartes’ idea of god.

This paper elaborates and defends a familiar ‘transparent’ account of knowledge of one's own beliefs, inspired by some remarks of Gareth Evans, and makes a case that the account can be extended to mental states in general, in particular to knowledge of one's intentions.

Recent work on rationality has been increasingly attentive to “coherence requirements”, with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their normative status (e.g., whether there is necessarily reason to comply with them). Yet there is little to no work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative requirements genuine (...) and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which of the requirements are genuine and which aren’t? This paper tries to offer an account that answers these questions. On my account, the incoherence of a set of attitudinal mental states is a matter of its being (partially) constitutive of the mental states in question that, for any agent that holds these attitudes jointly, the agent is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give up at least one of the attitudes. (shrink)

The general aim of this article is to carry out a reconstruction of the theory of Population Dynamics (DP) in Ecology, according to Castle’s (2001) general stance with regard to the semantic view of theories, but doing it within the framework of metatheoretical structuralism. Thus, we will first identify Population Dynamics’ basic theory-element: its core K(DP) – with the class of potential models, the class of models (through the identification of its fundamental law) and the class of partial potential models (...) (though leaving aside the identification of its constraints and its intertheoretical links) –, and its domain of intended applications I(DP). Then, we will establish the general guiding lines of its theory-net, developing in some detail one of its main lines of specialization – namely, that related to the so-called “continuous growing” of the considered populations –, with DP’s principal “models”, and leave developing of the other of its main lines of specialization – namely, that related to the so-called “discrete growing” of the considered populations – for a further publication. (shrink)

This chapter analyses the prospects of using neuroimaging methods, in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for philosophical purposes. To do so, it will use two case studies from the field of emotion research: Greene et al. (2001) used fMRI to uncover the mental processes underlying moral intuitions, while Lindquist et al. (2012) used fMRI to inform the debate around the nature of a specific mental process, namely, emotion. These studies illustrate two main approaches in cognitive neuroscience: Reverse inference and (...) ontology testing, respectively. With regards to Greene et al.’s study, the use of Neurosynth (Yarkoni 2011) will show that the available formulations of reverse inference, although viable a priori, seem to be of limited use in practice. On the other hand, the discussion of Lindquist et al.’s study will present the so far neglected potential of ontology-testing approaches to inform philosophical questions. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that some features, such as gender, race and sexual orientation, are socially constructed? Many scholars claim that social constructionism about a kind is a version of realism about that kind, according to which the corresponding kind is a social construction, that it, it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructionism, then, is a version of realism about a kind that asserts that the kind is real, and puts forward a particular view about (...) the nature of the kind, namely, that it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructivists about human kinds such as gender, race and sexual orientation often make an additional claim, namely, that these kinds are social constructions but they are typically believed to be biological kinds (that is, people are typically wrong about the nature of these kinds). Ron Mallon (2017) calls social constructions that are (falsely) taken to be biological kinds covert social constructions. This paper is about how we could have terms in our natural language that come to refer to covert social constructions. (shrink)

Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the only independent concrete object. The paper argues that, pace its proponents, Priority monism is in conflict with the dependence of any whole on any of its parts: if the cosmos does not depend on its parts, neither does any smaller composite.

Testimonial injustices occur when individuals from particular social groups are systematically and persistently given less credibility in their claims merely because of their group identity. Recent “pluralistic” approaches to folk psychology, by taking into account the role of stereotypes in how we understand others, have the power to explain how and why cases of testimonial injustice occur. If how we make sense of others’ behavior depends on assumptions about how individuals from certain groups think and act, this can explain why (...) speakers are given different degrees of credibility depending on their group identity. For example, if people assume that women are more emotional than men, they will systematically give less credibility to women’s claims. This explanation involves three empirical claims: people assume that women are more emotional than men, people assume that emotionality hinders credibility, and people give less credibility to women’s claims. While extant studies provide some support for and, no study to date has directly tested. In two different studies, we tested all these three claims. The results from both studies provide support for, as we found significant negative correlations between emotionality and credibility attributions. However, in contrast to what some accounts of folk psychology posit, we did not find any significant difference in people’s attributions of emotionality and credibility towards women versus men speakers. We hope that our studies here pave the way for further empirical studies testing the phenomenon of testimonial injustice in a context-sensitive way, in order to have a better understanding of the conditions in which testimonial injustices are likely to happen. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of John Rawls and Thomas Pogge, I argue that the U.S. is in part responsible for the immigration of Mexicans and Central Americans into the U.S. By seeking to further its national interests through its foreign policies, the U.S. has created economic and politically oppressive conditions that Mexican and Central American people seek to escape. The significance of this project is to highlight the role of the U.S. in illegal immigration so that we may first acknowledge (...) our responsibility in order to seek lasting humane solutions. (shrink)

The view that moods are dispositions has recently fallen into disrepute. In this paper we want to revitalise it by providing a new argument for it and by disarming an important objection against it. A shared assumption of our competitors (intentionalists about moods) is that moods are “diffuse”. First, we will provide reasons for thinking that existing intentionalist views do not in fact capture this distinctive feature of moods that distinguishes them from emotions. Second, we offer a dispositionalist alternative that (...) we think does better. Finally, we disarm the objection that is responsible for dispositionalism’s bad press. (shrink)

Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. The paper addresses two questions: Q1. What are these similarities (and differences)? Q2. How does one tell that one is recalling (and so not perceiving or imagining)?

Disagreement is a hot topic in epistemology. A fast-growing literature centers around a dispute between the ‘steadfast’ view, on which one may maintain one’s beliefs even in the light of disagreement with epistemic peers who have all the same evidence, and the ‘conciliationist’ view, on which such disagreement requires a revision of attitudes. In this paper, however, I argue that there is less separating the main rivals in the debate about peer disagreement than is commonly thought. The extreme versions of (...) both views are clearly indefensible, while more moderate versions of the views converge on the idea that how much revision of belief is called for by an instance of peer disagreement varies from case to case. Those tempted by this diagnosis are sometimes pessimistic about the prospects for giving a unified account which clearly predicts when more or less extensive revisions will be called for. By contrast, in this paper I give an account that aspires to such unity and predictive power, centering on the notion of the net resilience of your estimate of your own reliability against your estimate of your interlocutor’s reliability. The view I present thus amounts to a new, moderate theory of how one should respond to disagreement. I argue that ultimately, when we weaken conciliationism and the steadfast view to account for exception cases and to make them adequately plausible, they end up converging on the moderate view I present. Much of the seeming disagreement about disagreement is, then, illusory. (shrink)

Subtractive schooling is a type of pedagogy that subtracts from the student aspects of her identity in order to assimilate and reshape her identity to fit the American mainstream. Here, I question the value of assimilation as it takes place in our public school systems. Currently, immigrant children are often made to feel inadequate for being culturally different. This is detrimental to their development as students given that at their young age they do not yet have the emotional maturity to (...) know that their experience, language and culture are legitimate and valuable. My goal is to shift the focus of subtractive schooling to one that fosters the growth of students through recognition. I suggest that John Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of recognition is a helpful approach to this problem. Both Dewey and Freire’s pedagogy emphasize recognition as central to their pedagogy. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that we should amend the traditional understanding of the view known as the guise of the good. The guise of the good is traditionally understood as the view that we only want to act in ways that we believe to be good in some way. But it is argued that a more plausible view is that we only want to act in ways that we believe we have normative reason to act in. This change (...) – from formulating the view in terms of goodness to formulating it in terms of reasons – is significant because the revised view avoids various old and new counterexamples to the traditional view, because the revised view is better motivated than the traditional view, and because the revised view is better placed to explain certain features of desire than the traditional view. The paper finishes by showing that the conclusions reached are compatible with theories such as the buck passing account of value. (shrink)

Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief? I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions. A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional). I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is a necessary (...) condition for belief. I appeal to two areas of research that seem to show that implicit attitudes fail spectacularly to satisfy this condition—although persistent gaps in the empirical literature leave matters inconclusive. I sketch an alternative account, according to which implicit attitudes are sensitive merely to spatiotemporal relations in thought and perception, i.e., the spatial and temporal orders in which people think, see, or hear things. (shrink)

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an “existence proof” that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed—by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike—as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these “debiasing” procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the (...) failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away. (shrink)

Are emotions bodily feelings or evaluative cognitions? What is happiness, pain, or “being moved”? Are there basic emotions? In this chapter, I review extant empirical work concerning these and related questions in the philosophy of emotion. This will include both (1) studies investigating people’s emotional experiences and (2) studies investigating people’s use of emotion concepts in hypothetical cases. Overall, this review will show the potential of using empirical research methods to inform philosophical questions regarding emotion.

This paper offers a positive account of an important but under-explored class of mental states, non-propositional attitudes such as loving one’s department, liking lattice structures, fearing Freddy Krueger, and hating Sherlock Holmes. In broadest terms, the view reached is a representationalist account guided by two puzzles. The proposal allows one to say in an elegant way what differentiates a propositional attitude from an attitude merely about a proposition. The proposal also allows one to offer a unified account of the non-propositional (...) attitudes that captures both empty and non-empty cases by properly locating the posited representations in the metaphysical structure of the attitudes. (shrink)

In his genetic phenomenology, Husserl introduces types, pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception and cognition of objects. In this essay, I argue that there are two types that are functionally almost identical to Kant’s schemata. To support this conclusion, I first present an interpretation of Kant’s discussion of schemata. I argue that we must see schemata as pure, a priori cognitions that involve only pure intuition, pure concepts of the understanding, and the imagination. I offer two analogies to (...) explain how schemata function to subsume objects under concepts and to anticipate possible objects of experience before moving on to discuss the schema of substance. Next, I present a brief explanation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, organizing my presentation around the idea of apperception. This paves the way for a demonstration of how the fundamental type is best understood as standing at the center of a cluster of concepts, including apperception, passive belief, natural bodies, and the one spatio-temporal horizon of experience. I argue that the fundamental type is central to Husserl’s attempt to ground logic in pre-predicative experience. Finally, I compare two specific types with schemata on the grounds cultivated in the previous sections. The first of these types, the fundamental type, functions to pre-predicatively anticipate objects of possible experience, just as schemata do. The second of these types, which is implied by but never discussed in Husserl’s work, serves to mediate between a formal system of rules and an intuitive grasp of the world, just as schemata do. (shrink)

An interview by Alex Thomson of UKColumn on Landgrebe and Smith's book: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World. The subtitle of the book is Artificial Intelligence Without Fear, and the interview begins with the question of the supposedly imminent takeover of one profession or the other by artificial intelligence. Is there truly reason to be afraid that you will lose your job? The interview itself is titled 'Where this is no will there is no way', drawing on one (...) thesis of the book to the effect that there will never be anything like the human will on the part of a machine. This is for mathematical reasons. AI is always and in every case a matter of algorithms; thus of applied mathematics. And algorithms are not the sorts of things that can want or desire or intend to do something. It is the human will of those who work at OpenAI or google or microsoft which have given rise to the new shiny objects of AI (ChatGPT and other Large Language Models). And it is the human will of the users of these shiny objects which gives them the resources and power to work their apparent miracles. (shrink)

This chapter explores the idea that causal inference is warranted if and only if the mechanism underlying the inferred causal association is identified. This mechanistic stance is discernible in the epidemiological literature, and in the strategies adopted by epidemiologists seeking to establish causal hypotheses. But the exact opposite methodology is also discernible, the black box stance, which asserts that epidemiologists can and should make causal inferences on the basis of their evidence, without worrying about the mechanisms that might underlie their (...) hypotheses. I argue that the mechanistic stance is indeed a bad methodology for causal inference. However, I detach and defend a mechanistic interpretation of causal generalisations in epidemiology as existence claims about underlying mechanisms. (shrink)

The difference between the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons requires that there be a shift in the moral weight that we accord to changes in utility when we move from making intrapersonal tradeoffs to making interpersonal tradeoffs. We examine which forms of egalitarianism can, and which cannot, account for this shift. We argue that a form of egalitarianism which is concerned only with the extent of outcome inequality cannot account for this shift. We also argue that (...) a view which is concerned with both outcome inequality and with the unfairness of inequality in individuals‘ expected utilities can account for this shift. Finally, we limn an alternative view, on.. (shrink)

Although philosophers of art and aesthetics regularly appeal to a notion of ‘pictorial content’, there is little agreement over its nature. The present paper argues that pictures have propositional contents. This conclusion is reached by considering a style of argument having to do with the phenomenon of negation intended to show that pictures must have some kind of non-propositional content. I first offer reasons for thinking that arguments of that type fail. Second, I show that when properly understood, such arguments (...) can in fact be turned on their heads and shown to support the propositionalist position. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, perceptual beliefs are caused by perceptual experiences. The paper argues that this view makes it impossible to explain how experiences can be epistemically significant. A rival account, on which experiences in the “good case” are ways of knowing, is set out and defended.

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal (...) with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophical discussions of intentionality start and end with a treatment of the propositional attitudes. In fact, many theorists hold that all attitudes are propositional attitudes. Our folk-psychological ascriptions suggest, however, that there are non-propositional attitudes: I like Sally, my brother fears snakes, everyone loves my grandmother, and Rush Limbaugh hates Obama. I argue that things are as they appear: there are non-propositional attitudes. More specifically, I argue that there are attitudes that relate individuals to non-propositional objects and do (...) so not in virtue of relating them to propositions. I reach this conclusion by not only showing that attempted analyses of apparently non-propositional attitudes in terms of the propositional fail, but that some non-propositional attitudes don’t even supervene on propositional attitudes. If this is correct, then the common discussions of intentionality that address only propositional attitudes are incomplete and those who hold that all intentional states are propositional are mistaken. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that it is wrong for us to consume only, or overwhelmingly, media that broadly aligns with our own political viewpoints: that is, it is wrong to be politically “partisan” in our decisions about what media to consume. We are obligated to consume media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own – to “diversify our sources”. This is so even if our own views are, as a matter of fact, substantively correct.