We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental control, (...) people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)

Mind wandering is typically operationalized as task-unrelated thought. Some argue for the need to distinguish between unintentional and intentional mind wandering, where an agent voluntarily shifts attention from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. We reveal an inconsistency between the standard, task-unrelated thought definition of mind wandering and the occurrence of intentional mind wandering (together with plausible assumptions about tasks and intentions). This suggests that either the standard definition of mind wandering should be rejected or that intentional mind wandering is an incoherent (...) category. Solving this puzzle is critical for advancing theoretical frameworks of mind wandering. (shrink)

Are we ever morally permitted to do what is morally wrong? It seems intuitive that we are, but evidence for dissociations among judgment of permissibility and wrongness are relatively scarce. Across 4 experiments (N = 1,438), we show that people judge that some behaviors can be morally wrong and permissible. The dissociations arise because these judgments track different morally relevant aspects of everyday moral encounters. Judgments of individual rights predicted permissibility but not wrongness, while character assessment predicted wrongness but not (...) permissibility. These findings suggest a picture in which moral evaluation is granular enough to express reasoning about different types of normative considerations, notably the possibility that people can exercise their rights in morally problematic ways. (shrink)

In recent years, the number of studies examining mind wandering has increased considerably, and research on the topic has spread widely across various domains of psychological research. Although the term “mind wandering” has been used to refer to various cognitive states, researchers typically operationalize mind wandering in terms of “task-unrelated thought” (TUT). Research on TUT has shed light on the various task features that require people’s attention, and on the consequences of task inattention. Important methodological and conceptual complications do persist, (...) however, in current investigations of TUT. As we argue, these complications may be dampening the development of a more nuanced scientific account of TUT. Here, we outline three of the more prominent methodological and conceptual complications in the literature on TUT, and we discuss potential directions for researchers to take as they move forward in their investigations of TUT. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that sentences that contain ‘omission’ tokens that appear to function as singular terms are meaningful while maintaining the view that omissions are nothing at all or mere absences. I take omissions to be fictional entities and claim that the way in which sentences about fictional characters are true parallels the way in which sentences about omissions are true. I develop a pragmatic account of fictional reference and argue that my fictionalist account of omissions implies a (...) plausible account of the metaphysics of omissions. (shrink)

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or “task-unrelated thought”) is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as task requirements become automatized, performance should improve and depth of mind wandering should increase. Here, we used a serial reaction time task with implicit- and explicit-learning groups to test (...) these predictions. Providing novel evidence for the attentional resource account’s first prediction, results indicated that depth of mind wandering was negatively associated with learning in the explicit, but not the implicit, group, indicating that mind wandering is associated with impaired explicit, but not implicit, learning. Corroborating the attention resource account’s second prediction, we also found that, overall, performance improved while at the same time depth of mind wandering increased. From an implicit learning perspective, these results are consistent with the claim that explicit learning is impaired under attentional load, but implicit learning is not. (shrink)

The standard story about self-control states that self-control is limited, aversive, and that the function of self-control is to resist impulses or temptation. Several cases are provided that challenge this standard story. An alternative, future-oriented account of self-control is defended, where the function of self-control is to manage interference that arises from overlapping information processing pathways. This provides a computationally tractable account of self-control rooted in one’s being vigilant. Self-control manifests the maintenance dimension of vigilance. This not only provides an (...) attractive alternative to the standard story about self-control, but also indicates how the future-oriented aspects of self-control are more fundamental than the present-oriented aspects. (shrink)

Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility with the concept (...) of determinism, which calls into question the validity of experimental work operating under the Vignette-Judgment model. We also argue that alternative experimental paradigms are unlikely to elicit judgments that are philosophically relevant to questions about the metaphysics of free will. (shrink)

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of subjective experience. But why does the mind tend to wriggle about rather than always staying focused? To answer this question, this paper defends the claim that mind wandering consists in task-unrelated thought. Despite being the standard view of mind wandering in cognitive psychology, there has been no systematic elaboration or defense of the task-unrelated thought view of mind wandering. Here, I argue for the task-unrelated thought view by showing how mind wandering reflects a (...) distinctive form of non-vigilant thinking. When the relationship between mind wandering and vigilance is clarified, several objections to the task-unrelated thought view can be defused. Not only does this provide a novel defense of the task-unrelated thought view of mind wandering, but it also presents an account of mind wandering that is compatible with a naturalistic account of subjectivity. (shrink)

Some research suggests that moral behavior can be strongly influenced by trivial features of the environment of which we are completely unaware. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have argued that these findings undermine our commonsense notions of agency and responsibility, both of which emphasize the role of practical reasoning and conscious deliberation in action. We present the results of four vignette-based studies (N = 1,437) designed to investigate how people think about the metaphysical and moral implications of scientific findings that reveal (...) our susceptibility to automaticity and situational influences. When presented with lightly fictionalized narratives about these findings, participants exhibit no tendency toward changing judgments of freedom and responsibility compared to control groups. This suggests that people seem unwilling to adopt skeptical attitudes about agency on the basis of these scientific findings. (shrink)

How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this information is relevant to the wrongdoing that (...) elicits blame. Further, the effect of character information on blame depends on judgments about the true self that are independent of judgments of intentionality. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 662), we found support for all three predictions of the Two Channel Model. We propose that this reflects two distinct functions of blame: a social regulatory function that encourages norm compliance and a pedagogical function that encourages personal improvement. (shrink)

The third Meditation is typically understood to contain two a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. The author focuses on the second argument, where Descartes proves the existence of God partly in virtue of proving that Descartes cannot be the cause of himself. To establish this, Descartes argues that if he were the cause of himself, then he would endow himself with any conceivable perfection. The justification for this claim is that bringing about a substance is more difficult than (...) creating an attribute, so anything that can do the former can do the latter. While current explanations of this justification are either implausible or inadequate, the author argues that this principle derives support from a scholastic distinction between being-as-such and determinate being. With this distinction in view, we can make sense of Descartes's argument without appealing to ambiguous or inadequate notions. (shrink)

It seems to be a common and intuitively plausible assumption that conversational implicatures arise only when one of the so-called conversational maxims is violated at the level of what is said. The basic idea behind this thesis is that, unless a maxim is violated at the level of what is said, nothing can trigger the search for an implicature. Thus, non-violating implicatures wouldn’t be calculable. This paper defends the view that some conversational implicatures arise even though no conversational maxim is (...) violated at the level of what is said. (shrink)

Fine is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by (...) Fine, and fails to capture paradigmatic instances of essence involving abundant properties and relations. (shrink)

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...) contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play. (shrink)

Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way, we can provide principled explanations for the difference between (...) clinical and non-clinical cases of confabulation and the extent to which confabulation is rational. (shrink)

To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strategies as significantly more effective for people tempted to break moral relative to (...) immoral commitments, even when controlling for perceived temptation and trait self-control. Experiment 3 showed that as people perceived commitments to have more positive moral valence, they judged attentional focus strategies to be significantly more effective relative to attentional distraction strategies. Moreover, this effect was partly mediated by perceived differences in motivation. These results indicate that moralization informs decision-making processes related to self-control strategy selection. (shrink)

In 1772, Kant outlined the new problem of his critical period in terms of four possible “ways” of understanding the agreement of knowledge with its object. This study expands Kant’s terse descriptions of these ways, examining why he rejected them. Apart from clarifying the historical context in which Kant saw his own achievement (the Fifth Way), the chief benefits of exploring the historical background of Way Two, in particular, are that it (1) explains the puzzling intuitus originarius/intellectus archetypus dichotomy, and (...) (2) casts doubt on the received idea that Kant broke with the traditional theocentric model of cognition. (shrink)

Fitouchi et al. claim that seemingly victimless pleasures and nonproductive activities are moralized because they alter self-control. Their account predicts that: (1) victimless excesses are negatively moralized because they diminish self-control, and (2) restrained behaviors are positively moralized because they enhance self-control. Several examples run contrary to these predictions and call into question the general relationship between self-control and cooperation.

Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, (2) that people (...) with predominantly incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and (3) people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies (n = 378) that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity. (shrink)

In the *Science of Logic*, Hegel states unequivocally that the category of “life” is a strictly logical, or pure, form of thinking. His treatment of actual life – i.e., that which empirically constitutes nature – arises first in his *Philosophy of Nature* when the logic is applied under the conditions of space and time. Nevertheless, many commentators find Hegel’s development of this category as a purely logical one especially difficult to accept. Indeed, they find this development only comprehensible as long (...) as one simultaneously assumes that Hegel breaks his promise to let the logic do the leading. However, if Hegel were to in fact allow the logical development to be led by biological analogies at this point, problems would ensue. Not only would it contradict his own speculative method, which should secure the necessity of the categories, but it would also endanger the ontological generality of the category of life itself. Beyond undermining his method and the logical integrity of the category, however, I will argue that such a reading makes the transition to the next category of “cognition” unintelligible and problematic. My aim in the first part of this paper is to argue how logical life can be read as a pure category. I then argue in the second part how my reconstruction makes the transition to cognition intelligible without resorting to profane or supernatural interpretations. (shrink)

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that (...) people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will. (shrink)

Why are we accountable for negligent wrongdoing? This paper develops a contractualist account of accountability for negligent wrongdoing rooted in maintaining self-trust. Displays of negligence threaten the self-trust needed to exercise planning agency. People thus have reason to take responsibility for being negligent to defeat higher-order evidence about the unreliability of one’s planning agency. Individuals are rationally required to take responsibility for negligence in virtue of the demands of planning agency. One novel implication of this view is that taking responsibility (...) for negligence grounds our holding others responsible for negligence. (shrink)

This paper proceeds in two parts. In the first part, I set out Fodor’s concerns about abduction in his recent books, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way and In Critical Condition. In the second part, I attempt to meet these concerns by suggesting how - within the framework of the Massive Modularity Hypothesis - abduction functions, specifically in the context of means-end reasoning to connect Input Modules and Output Modules. My suggestion will be that natural selection is the Mother of (...) Abductive Inference and that it is evidenced in all sorts of sub-doxastic Means-End Reasoning contexts and for a variety of species. I will eventually discuss two representative cases to illustrate this suggestion: namely, dead reckoning and spatial reorientation. (shrink)

A number of bioethicists have been critical of the power of the family to “veto” a patient’s decision to posthumously donate her organs within opt-in systems of organ procurement. One major objection directed at the family veto is that when families veto the decision of their deceased family member, they do something wrong by violating or failing to respect the autonomy of that deceased family member. The goal of this paper is to make progress on answering this objection. I do (...) this in two stages. First, I argue that the most plausible interpretation of what happens when a person registers as an organ donor in an opt-in system is that she gives her consent to the state to posthumously remove her organs for transplantation purposes. Call this the Authorization Account. Second, given the Authorization Account, I argue by analogy that when families veto an individual’s decision to donate and the individual’s organs are not in the end removed, neither the doctors nor the family violate the individual’s autonomy in any morally objectionable sense. Call this the Nonremoval Thesis. I argue that since the Nonremoval Thesis is true, we do not violate or fail to respect the autonomy of registered donors when we fail to remove their organs because their family has objected. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing (...) the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency. (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive overview and introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Propositions.

A primary aim of mind-wandering research has been to understand its influence on task performance. While this research has typically highlighted the costs of mind wandering, a handful of studies have suggested that mind wandering may be beneficial in certain situations. Perhaps the most-touted benefit is that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates creative thinking. This finding has played a critical role in the development of accounts of the adaptive value of mind wandering and its functional role, as well (...) as potential mechanisms of mind wandering. Thus, a demonstration of the replicability of this important finding is warranted. Here, we attempted to conceptually replicate results of a highly cited laboratory-based experiment supporting this finding. However, across two studies (N = 443), we found no evidence for the claim that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates a form of creativity associated with divergent thinking. We suggest that our failed conceptual replication stems from an inadequate characterization of mind wandering (task-unrelated thought), and that there are good reasons to think that task-unrelated thought is unlikely to be causally related to creativity. Our results cast doubt on the claim that task-unrelated thought during an incubation interval enhances divergent creativity while also offering some prescriptions for how future research might further elucidate the cognitive benefits of mind wandering. (shrink)

Kant’s claim that we must postulate the immortality of the soul is polarizing. While much attention has been paid to two standard arguments in its defense (one moral-psychological, the other rational), I contend that a favorite argument of Kant’s from the apogee of his critical period, namely, the teleological argument, deserves renewed attention. This paper reconstructs it and exhibits what makes it unique (though not necessarily superior) in relation to the other arguments. In particular, its form (as third-personal or descriptive, (...) beginning from observations) and related force of assent (as a subjectively universal reflective judgment) set it apart from the other arguments. My goal is to establish that any engagement with Kant’s immortality postulate must include equal consideration of the teleological argument in order to be complete. (shrink)

Discussion of the relevance of grounding to substantiveness, theory-choice, and “location problems” in metaphysics.

A supplemental document for "Metalinguistic Gradability".

Mark Jago has presented a dilemma for truthmaker non-maximalism—the thesis that some but not all truths require truthmakers. The dilemma arises because some truths that do not require truthmakers by the non-maximalist’s lights (e.g., that Santa Claus does not exist) are necessitated by truths that do (e.g., that Barack Obama knows that Santa Claus does not exist). According to Jago, the non-maximalist can supply a truthmaker for such a truth only by conceding the primary motivation for the view: that it (...) allows one to avoid positing strange ‘negative’ entities without adopting a non-standard account of the necessary features of ordinary things. In this paper, I sketch out and defend two plausible non-maximalist proposals that evade Jago’s dilemma. (shrink)

Otto Neurath’s empiricist methodology of economics and his contributions to politi- cal economy have gained increasing attention in recent years. We connect this research with contemporary debates regarding the epistemological status of thought experiments by reconstructing Neurath’s utopias as linchpins of thought experiments. In our three reconstructed examples of different uses of utopias/dystopias in thought experiments we employ a reformulation of Häggqvist’s model for thought experiments and we argue that: (1) Our reformulation of Häggqvist’s model more adequately complies with many (...) uses of thought experiments, especially with the open-ended discussions of utopias and dys- topias in thought experiments. (2) As a strict logical empiricist, Neurath is committed to a strictly empiricist account of thought experiments. John Norton’s empiricist argument view can indeed account for the justifications of empirical beliefs and genuine discoveries targeted by scientific utopianism in three distinct (yet connected) ways, all of which Neur- ath already contemplated: (2.I) Dealing with utopias and thought experiments on a regular basis increases creativity and inventiveness. (2.II) Particular ways of presenting knowl- edge facilitate scientific discovery and social progress. (2.III) The use of utopias in thought experiments can prompt conceptual change and allow access to new phenomena. We con- clude by highlighting that, even though thought experiments support a positive attitude for exploring new social possibilities, Neurath points out that active decisions are unavoidable. The exploration of alternatives and the awareness of a need for decisions in policy discus- sion avert a technocratic outlook in social science. (shrink)

This is a rough translation of Michael Frede's "La théorie aristotélicienne de l'intellect agent" published in 1996. This insightful paper contains an important interpretation of Aristotle's notoriously difficult theory of the active intellect from De Anima III, 5. I worked up a translation during some research and thought others might benefit from having an English translation available (I couldn't find one after a cursory internet search). It's not perfect, but it should give one a sense for Frede's argument that the (...) agent intellect is the same as the divine intellect of Metaphysics Lambda. I welcome any comments or suggestions for improvement, please email me at smurray7 [at] providence [dot] edu. (shrink)

Doris argues that an agent is responsible for her behavior only if that behavior expresses (a relevant subset of) the agent’s values. This view has problems explaining responsibility for mistakes or episodes of forgetfulness. These problems highlight a conceptual problem with Doris’s theory of responsible agency and give us reasons to prefer an alternative (non-valuational) theory of responsible agency.

My primary target in this paper is a puzzle that emerges from the conjunction of several seemingly innocent assumptions in action theory and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. The puzzle I have in mind is this. On one widely held account of moral responsibility, an agent is morally responsible only for those actions or outcomes over which that agent exercises control. Recently, however, some have cited cases where agents appear to be morally responsible without exercising any control. This leads some (...) to abandon the control-based account of responsibility and replace it with an alternative account. It leads others to deny the intuition that agents are responsible in these troublesome cases. After outlining the account of moral responsibility I have in mind, I look at some of the arguments made against the viability of this theory. I show that there are conceptual resources for salvaging the control account, focusing in particular on the nature of vigilance. I also argue that there is empirical data that supports the control account so conceived. (shrink)

We propose that, for the purpose of studying theoretical properties of the knowledge of an agent with Artificial General Intelligence (that is, the knowledge of an AGI), a pragmatic way to define such an agent’s knowledge (restricted to the language of Epistemic Arithmetic, or EA) is as follows. We declare an AGI to know an EA-statement φ if and only if that AGI would include φ in the resulting enumeration if that AGI were commanded: “Enumerate all the EA-sentences which you (...) know.” This definition is non-circular because an AGI, being capable of practical English communication, is capable of understanding the everyday English word “know” independently of how any philosopher formally defines knowledge; we elaborate further on the non-circularity of this circular-looking definition. This elegantly solves the problem that different AGIs may have different internal knowledge definitions and yet we want to study knowledge of AGIs in general, without having to study different AGIs separately just because they have separate internal knowledge definitions. Finally, we suggest how this definition of AGI knowledge can be used as a bridge which could allow the AGI research community to import certain abstract results about mechanical knowing agents from mathematical logic. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss what I will call “skeptical pragmatic invariantism” as a potential response to the intuitions we have about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. SPI, very roughly, is a form of epistemic invariantism that says the following: The subject in the bank cases doesn’t know that the bank will be open. The knowledge ascription in the low standards case seems appropriate nevertheless because it has a true implicature. The goal of this paper is to (...) show that SPI is mistaken. In particular, I will show that SPI is incompatible with reasonable assumptions about how we are aware of the presence of implicatures. Such objections are not new, but extant formulations are wanting for reasons I will point out below. One may worry that refuting SPI is not a worthwhile project given that this view is an implausible minority position anyway. To respond, I will argue that, contrary to common opinion, other familiar objections to SPI fail and, thus, that SPI is a promising position to begin with. (shrink)

There have long been calls from industry for guidance in implementing strategies for sustainable development. The Circular Economy represents the most recent attempt to conceptualize the integration of economic activity and environmental wellbeing in a sustainable way. This set of ideas has been adopted by China as the basis of their economic development, escalating the concept in minds of western policymakers and NGOs. This paper traces the conceptualisations and origins of the Circular Economy, tracing its meanings, and exploring its antecedents (...) in economics and ecology, and discusses how the Circular Economy has been operationalized in business and policy. The paper finds that while the Circular Economy places emphasis on the redesign of processes and cycling of materials, which may contribute to more sustainable business models, it also encapsulates tensions and limitations. These include an absence of the social dimension inherent in sustainable development that limits its ethical dimensions, and some unintended consequences. This leads us to propose a revised definition of the Circular Economy as “an economic model wherein planning, resourcing, procurement, production and reprocessing are designed and managed, as both process and output, to maximize ecosystem functioning and human well-being”. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the volume "Explanation Beyond Causation: Philosophical Perspectives on Non-Causal Explanations", edited by A. Reutlinger and J. Saatsi (OUP, forthcoming in 2017). -/- Explanations are very important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the (...) phenomenon to be explained. Such causal accounts have been the received view of the nature of explanation, particularly in philosophy of science, since the 1980s. However, philosophers have recently begun to break with this causal tradition by shifting their focus to kinds of explanation that do not turn on causal information. The increasing recognition of the importance of such non-causal explanations in the sciences and elsewhere raises pressing questions for philosophers of explanation. What is the nature of non-causal explanations - and which theory best captures it? How do non-causal explanations relate to causal ones? How are non-causal explanations in the sciences related to those in mathematics and metaphysics? This volume of new essays explores answers to these and other questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of explanation. The essays address these questions from a variety of perspectives, including general accounts of non-causal and causal explanations, as well as a wide range of detailed case studies of non-causal explanations from the sciences, mathematics and metaphysics. (shrink)

Recent discussions of emergence in physics have focussed on the use of limiting relations, and often particularly on singular or asymptotic limits. We discuss a putative example of emergence that does not fit into this narrative: the case of phonons. These quasi-particles have some claim to be emergent, not least because the way in which they relate to the underlying crystal is almost precisely analogous to the way in which quantum particles relate to the underlying quantum field theory. But there (...) is no need to take a limit when moving from a crystal lattice based description to the phonon description. Not only does this demonstrate that we can have emergence without limits, but also provides a way of understanding cases that do involve limits. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that the universality of critical phenomena is explained through particular applications of the renormalization group. This article has three aims: to clarify the structure of the explanation of universality, to discuss the physics of such RG explanations, and to examine the extent to which universality is thus explained. The derivation of critical exponents proceeds via a real-space or a field-theoretic approach to the RG. Building on work by Mainwood, this article argues that these approaches ought to (...) be distinguished: while the field-theoretic approach explains universality, the real-space approach fails to provide an adequate explanation. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Tristan Haze offers two examples that, he claims, are counterexamples to Nozick's Theory of Knowledge. Haze claims his examples work against Nozick's theory understood as relativized to belief forming methods M. We believe that they fail to be counterexamples to Nozick's theory. Since he aims the examples at tracking theories generally, we will also explain why they are not counterexamples to Dretske's Conclusive Reasons Theory of Knowledge.

In “Beat the (Backward) Clock,” we argued that John Williams and Neil Sinhababu’s Backward Clock Case fails to be a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s or Fred Dretske’s Theories of Knowledge. Williams’ reply to our paper, “There’s Nothing to Beat a Backward Clock: A Rejoinder to Adams, Barker and Clarke,” is a further attempt to defend their counterexample against a range of objections. In this paper, we argue that, despite the number and length of footnotes, Williams is still wrong.

Epistemic invariantism, or invariantism for short, is the position that the proposition expressed by knowledge sentences does not vary with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can be used. At least one of the major challenges for invariantism is to explain our intuitions about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. These cases elicit intuitions to the effect that the truth-value of knowledge sentences varies with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can (...) be used. In this paper, I will defend invariantism against this challenge by advocating the following, somewhat deflationary account of the bank case intuitions: Readers of the bank cases assign different truth-values to the knowledge claims in the bank cases because they interpret these scenarios such that the epistemic position of the subject in question differs between the high and the low standards case. To substantiate this account, I will argue, first, that the bank cases are underspecified even with respect to features that should uncontroversially be relevant for the epistemic position of the subject in question. Second, I will argue that readers of the bank cases will fill in these features differently in the low and the high standards case. In particular, I will argue that there is a variety of reasons to think that the fact that an error-possibility is mentioned in the high standards case will lead readers to assume that this error-possibility is supposed to be likely in the high standards case. (shrink)