Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)

IPCC SPECIAL REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAND (SRCCL) -/- Chapter 3: Climate Change and Land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.

Applied ontologies have been used more and more frequently to enhance systems engineering. In this paper, we argue that adopting principles of ontological realism can increase the benefits that ontologies have already been shown to provide to the systems engineering process. Moreover, adopting Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an ISO standard for top-level ontologies from which more domain specific ontologies are constructed, can lead to benefits in four distinct areas of systems engineering: (1) interoperability, (2) standardization, (3) testing, and (4) data (...) exploitation. Reaping these benefits in a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) context requires utilizing an ontology’s vocabulary when modeling systems and entities within those systems. If the chosen ontology abides by the principles of ontological realism, a semantic standard capable of uniting distinct domains, using BFO as a hub, can be leveraged to promote greater interoperability among systems. As interoperability and standardization increase, so does the ability to collect data during the testing and implementation of systems. These data can then be reasoned over by computational reasoners using the logical axioms within the ontology. This, in turn, generates new data that would have been impossible or too inefficient to generate without the aid of computational reasoners. (shrink)

The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine is 90 percent effective in protecting against COVID-19. It would not have been possible without the tireless effort of Professor Katalin Karikó, a scientific innovator fitting the mold of dynamic inventor Arthur Diamond presents in his book, Openness to Creative Destruction Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. Not only did Professor Karikó persist in her beliefs in the therapeutic potential of synthetic messenger RNA over the course of four decades, but she did so despite the criticisms of other scientists (...) and despite lack of financial backing for large parts of her career. Professor Karikó is a good example of the unconventional picture that Diamond paints of entrepreneurs in a specific version of market capitalism he terms, innovative dynamism. Specifically, she is an example of someone who does not hold prevailing academic theories in too high a regard and instead privileges her tacit knowledge (knowledge gained from years of working with mRNA in the lab) to persist believing in the potential of a therapy that now could quite literally save the world. Most surprisingly, she, like most of the entrepreneurs surveyed in the book, seem not primarily motivated by profit, though the money their projects eventually attract is integral to disseminating their creative ideas to the masses. -/- Are the many examples offered by Diamond that are similar to Professor Karikó’s story evidence against the long-standing suspicion that there is something morally damning in the self-interested motivations of innovative entrepreneurship? Is it the case that others would have inevitably pursued the cure that Karikó pursued, regardless of economic system? In light of COVID-19 and other high-pressure situations, ought we to care how we constrain the innovators who develop solutions? Diamond’s case for the economic system, innovative dynamism, seeks to answer these and other important questions concerning our political and cultural treatment of innovators and entrepreneurs. This review critically assesses his efforts. I make my case by first reviewing the major argumentative structure of the book, then I summarize and evaluate the three major themes Diamond presents in the book: (1) what is innovative dynamism and who are its competitors, (2) what are the major benefits of innovative dynamism, (3) who is the innovative entrepreneur and how do we support him or her? (shrink)

Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.

In der musikalischen Methode der kollektiven Improvisation kommt eine Spielauffassung zum Ausdruck, deren demokratisch-emanzipatorische Grundeinstellung Vergleiche mit dem von Jürgen Habermas formulierten Konzept der idealen Sprechsituation nahe legt. Diese Vermutung wird im Rahmen einer einleitenden Annäherung an die kollektive Improvisation als von Interaktivität und Synchronizität geprägtes Beziehungsgeschehen näher ausgeführt. Nach einer Diskussion des improvisatorischen Handelns in der Musik in Bezug auf theoretische, historische und psychologische Aspekte werden die verschiedenen, aus dem Free Jazz der 1960er Jahre hervorgegangenen Entwicklungsstufen der freien bzw. (...) kollektiven Improvisation dargestellt. Im Anschluss daran wird die Kollektiv-Improvisation unter Bezugnahme auf das Konzept der idealen Sprechsituation diskutiert und im interkulturellen Kontext verortet, wobei die von Musikern wie Derek Bailey geforderte Sublimierung idiomatischer, kulturell geprägter Ausdrucksformen durch die individuelle Entwicklung einer charakteristischen Klangsprache am Instrument als egalisierend für die tendenziell asymmetrisch geprägten Dialogformen dieser Situation erläutert wird. Inklusive Interviews mit Evan Parker, Alexander von Schlippenbach und Joe Fonda. (shrink)

This is a fine book by an extraordinary author whose literary followers have awaited a definitive statement of his views on consciousness since his participation in the important book on biological autopoiesis, The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) and his recent neurophenomenology of biological systems, Mind in Life (2007). In the latter book, Thompson demonstrated the continuity of life and mind, whereas in this book he uses neurophenomenology as well as erudite renditions of Buddhist philosophy and a good (...) dash of personal experience to argue for the reality of altered states of consciousness, but also that these states are not distinct from the physical systems that subtend them. He must have touched a nerve, for Waking, Dreaming, Being continues to be read and widely discussed by the literate public. (shrink)

Having elsewhere connected Walter Otto’s interpretation of Dionysus as a politically progressive deity to Huey P. Newton’s vision for the Black Panthers, I here expand this inquiry to a line of Otto-inspired scholarship. First, Alain Daniélou identifies Dionysus and Shiva as the dancing god of a democratic/decolonizing cult oppressed by tyrannical patriarchies. Arthur Evans sharpens this critique of sexism and heteronormativity, concluding that, as Dionysus’s chorus is to Greek tragedy, so Socrates’s circle is to Western philosophy. I thus call (...) for the creation of a hybrid Dionysian-Socratic revolutionary philosophical chorus, modeled on Dionysus Lyseus, wielding philosophical analysis to loosen injustice’s bonds, as a vanguard of social justice. I find a handbook for this chorus’s creation in Euripides’s Bacchae, whose Dionysus is an ally of immigrant women, overthrower of Theban patriarchy, and international revolutionary. Finally, I offer a contemporary example of such a chorus that is based in my hometown in Alabama, namely, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild. (shrink)

‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases where moral argument alone does (...) not suffice. Specifically, virtue signaling can change the broader public’s social expectations, which can in turn motivate the adoption of new, positive social norms. I also argue that the reputation-seeking motives underlying virtue signaling impose important constraints on virtue signalers’ behavior, which serve to keep the worst excesses of virtue signaling in check. (shrink)

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...) fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading-based model of the socio-cognitive processes underlying trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

Phillips and colleagues convincingly argue that knowledge attribution is a faster, more automatic form of mindreading than belief attribution. However, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that lends it this cognitive advantage. I suggest an explanation of the knowledge-attribution advantage that would also help to distinguish it from belief-based and minimalist alternatives.

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...) attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior. (shrink)

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue (...) for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In (...) this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms. (shrink)

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...) from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of belief in our everyday social interactions. The epistemic concept of belief is (...) primarily used to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief, in contrast, is primarily used as a means of signaling one's social identity to other members of one's community. In turn, community members closely monitor each other's symbolic beliefs as a means of enforcing social norms. (shrink)

We lay out the fatalist’s argument, making sure to clarify which dialectical moves are available to the libertarian. We then offer a more robust presentation of Ockhamism, responding to obvious objections and teasing out the implications of the view. At this point, we discuss presentism and eternalism in more detail. We then present our argument for the claim that the libertarian cannot take Ockham’s way out of the fatalism argument unless she rejects presentism. Finally, we consider and dispense with objections (...) to our argument. In the end, it ought to be clear that the libertarian must make a choice between Ockham’s way out and presentism. (shrink)

Nativists about theory of mind have typically explained why children below the age of four fail the false belief task by appealing to the demands that these tasks place on children’s developing executive abilities. However, this appeal to executive functioning cannot explain a wide range of evidence showing that social and linguistic factors also affect when children pass this task. In this paper, I present a revised nativist proposal about theory of mind development that is able to accommodate these findings, (...) which I call the pragmatic development account. According to this proposal, we can gain a better understanding of the shift in children’s performance on standard false-belief tasks around four years of age by considering how children’s experiences with the pragmatics of belief discourse affect the way they interpret the task. (shrink)

This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, (...) the disjunction of all such mistakes should receive significant credence. The article then discusses what our society should do in light of the likelihood that we are doing something seriously wrong: we should regard intellectual progress, of the sort that will allow us to find and correct our moral mistakes as soon as possible, as an urgent moral priority rather than as a mere luxury; and we should also consider it important to save resources and cultivate flexibility, so that when the time comes to change our policies we will be able to do so quickly and smoothly. (shrink)

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others only (...) together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. (shrink)

According to the two-systems account of mindreading, our mature perspective-taking abilities are subserved by two distinct mindreading systems: a fast but inflexible, “implicit” system, and a flexible but slow “explicit” one. However, the currently available evidence on adult perspective-taking does not support this account. Specifically, both Level-1 and Level-2 perspective-taking show a combination of efficiency and flexibility that is deeply inconsistent with the two-systems architecture. This inconsistency also turns out to have serious consequences for the two-systems framework as a whole, (...) both as an account of our mature mindreading abilities and of the development of those abilities. What emerges from this critique is a conception of context-sensitive, spontaneous mindreading that may provide insight into how mindreading functions in complex social environments. This in turn offers a bulwark against skepticism about the role of mindreading in everyday social cognition. (shrink)

Se aborda el problema de qué es una ley científica. Se analiza la concepción tradicional hempeliana sobre la posibilidad de caracterizar una forma lógica para los enunciados de ley científica, que las distinguiría de las regularidades accidentales, concluyendo que ello no es posible. Se analiza entonces el problema de cómo es posible la predicción a partir de enunciados de ley, si no hay diferencia lógica con afirmaciones de regularidad, buscando criterios que permitan el establercimiento de afirmaciones proyectables. Correlativamente se trata (...) el problema de la normatividad de un criterio de identificación de candidatos a enunciados de ley, candidatos que ya no denominamos "lawlike statements" puesto que se ha abandonado la pretensión de que lo que determina los buenos candidatos a leyes sea su forma. A lo largo del texto se analizan de modo argumentado las posiciones filosóficas más tradicionales. Las conclusiones apuntan a la posibilidad de criterios de identificación a leyes sólo parcialmente normativos. (shrink)

Country music critics and scholars have noticed an apparent contradiction between the practical identity of country music with the image of the male country singer as the 'rhinestone cowboy'. In this case, the problem is one of how we can make sense of the rural, working-class, ruggedly masculinity persona common to the genre with its elaborately embroidered, brightly colored, and highly embellished male fashion. The intractability of this problem has led some to argue that the simplest solution is to just (...) deny the legitimacy of country music authenticity discourse altogether. That is, all the genre’s talk of the rural working class is inauthentic and should be discarded. Here, I argue that by accounting for country music authenticity in terms of the genre being a dual character concept, we can fully address the skeptic's worries. Beyond merely being compatible with the Nudie suit however, this notion of authenticity is also our best way of understanding the aesthetic value of the rhinestone cowboy image at all. The resulting picture, in which the suit primarily serves as an epistemic signifier of one’s standing in the country music community, allows for the Nudie suit to function as a class, and sometimes queer, commentary on mainstream culture. (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

Genres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x (...) is the genre of that work). A work can be good all things considered, but genre membership provides us with an additional set of evaluative criteria over and above those of the medium, which colors how we interpret and appreciate the work. Given this importance, it is not surprising that philosophers of art have been interested in providing an account of what, exactly, a genre is. Despite this interest, there is not widespread agreement about what it takes for something to be a genre, nor what kinds of considerations are relevant in determining whether a work is a member of that genre. Beyond this, we might also want to know to what degree we ought to consider genre in evaluating a work of art and why it should matter at all. Here, I explore the variety of recent theories that philosophers have taken up on the topic of genre and why we should ultimately think of genres as artistic practices rather than the alternatives. (shrink)

Groove, as a musical quality, is an important part of jazz and pop music appreciative practices. Groove talk is widespread among musicians and audiences, and considerable importance is placed on generating and appreciating grooves in music. However, musicians, musicologists, and audiences use groove attributions in a variety of ways that do not track one consistent underlying concept. I argue that that there are at least two distinct concepts of groove. On one account, groove is ‘the feel of the music’ and, (...) on the other, groove is the psychological feeling (induced by music) of wanting to move one’s body. Further, I argue that recent work in music psychology shows that these two concepts do not converge on a unified set of musical features. Finally, I also argue that these two concepts play different functional roles in the appreciative practices of jazz and popular music. This should cause us to further consider the mediating role genre plays for aesthetic concepts and provides us with reason for adopting a more communitarian approach to aesthetics which is attentive to the ways in which aesthetic discourse serves the practices of different audiences. (shrink)

At a crucial juncture in Plato’s Sophist, when the interlocutors have reached their deepest confusion about being and not-being, the Eleatic Visitor proclaims that there is yet hope. Insofar as they clarify one, he maintains, they will equally clarify the other. But what justifies the Visitor’s seemingly oracular prediction? A new interpretation explains how the Visitor’s hope is in fact warranted by the peculiar aporia they find themselves in. The passage describes a broader pattern of ‘exploring both sides’ that lends (...) insight into Plato’s aporetic method. (shrink)

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice, whether that is about hip-hop music, romance novels, or film noir. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genres. Whether they are giving accounts of genres as such or of particular genres, genre talk abounds in philosophy as much as it does the popular discourse. As a result, theories of genre proliferate as well. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so far focused on capturing all (...) of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art. (shrink)

Contingency is the presence of non-actualized possibility in the world. Fatalism is a view of reality on which there is no contingency. Since it is contingency that permits agency, there has traditionally been much interest in contingency. This interest has long been embarrassed by the contention that simple and plausible assumptions about the world lead to fatalism. I begin with an Aristotelian argument as presented by Richard Taylor. Appreciation of this argument has been stultified by a question pertaining to the (...) source of necessity and possibility and a closely related one regarding the nature of metaphysics itself. Answering these questions reveals the crucial issue here, to wit, necessity and possibility in a temporal world. This issue is investigated through an important later criticism of Taylor by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s critique is significant because it brings to the fore the pivotal notion for understanding contingency in a temporal world, that of synchronic possibility, the idea that incompatible states of affairs are possible at a single moment. This notion provides the basis of distinguishing two systematic accounts of truth, modality and time: two metaphysics of contingency. On one account, Taylor’s Aristotelian argument is straightforwardly valid and compelling; on the other, it is fallacious. In closing, I present reasons why the former account, supporting the Aristotelian views of time and truth, is correct and make some comments to ameliorate this conclusion. (shrink)

We formulate a sort of "generic" cosmological argument, i.e., a cosmological argument that shares premises (e.g., "contingent, concretely existing entities have a cause") with numerous versions of the argument. We then defend each of the premises by offering pragmatic arguments for them. We show that an endorsement of each premise will lead to an increase in expected utility; so in the absence of strong evidence that the premises are false, it is rational to endorse them. Therefore, it is rational to (...) endorse the cosmological argument, and so rational to endorse theism. We then consider possible objections. (shrink)

Moral character judgments pervade our everyday social interactions. But are these judgments epistemically reliable? In this paper, I discuss a challenge to the reliability of ordinary virtue and vice attribution that emerges from Christian Miller’s Mixed Traits theory of moral character, which entails that the majority of our ordinary moral character judgments are false. In response to this challenge, I argue that a key prediction of this theory is not borne out by the available evidence; this evidence further suggests that (...) our moral character judgments do converge upon real psychological properties of individuals. I go on to argue that this is because the evidence for the Mixed Traits Theory does not capture the kind of compassionate behaviors that ordinary folk really care about. Ultimately, I suggest that our ordinary standards for virtue and vice have a restricted social scope, which reflects the parochial nature of our characterological moral psychology. (shrink)

The problem of the many threatens to show that, in general, there are far more ordinary objects than you might have thought. I present and motivate a solution to this problem using many-one identity. According to this solution, the many things that seem to have what it takes to be, say, a cat, are collectively identical to that single cat.

I argue alongside some other scholars that there is a plausible reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide which holds both of the following tenets: first, that suicides occur because of external conditions, and second, that there are at least some suicides which are rational. These two tenets require special attention because they seem to be the source of significant tension. For Spinoza, if one’s cognitions are to be the most adequate, they must be “disposed internally” (E2p29s/G II 114), or determined (...) more from one’s own mental nature than from “fortuitous encounters” with other things (E2p29s/G II 114). It may seem there is a conflict, then, in saying both that there are rational suicides in the Spinozist framework, and that suicides must always be a result of external conditions: it seems a suicide simply cannot be rational if it is the result of external conditions. But this tension, it will be shown, can be dissolved. Once this tension is dealt with, I offer some brief closing arguments. I explain how this reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide can satisfy a call for new suicide research which avoids forms of over-individualism and epistemic injustice, and which encourages us to abolish oppressive conditions that lead to rational suicides. (shrink)

In “Rethinking Norm Psychology,” Cecilia Heyes offers an insightful critique of nativist approaches to the psychology of norms and then proposes a plausible alternative model grounded in the theory of cognitive gadgets. We are broadly sympathetic to both the critique and to the cognitive-gadgets model, though our own pluralistic approach to the psychology of norms (Westra & Andrews, 2022) leads us to think that the range of psychological and ecological processes that contributes to our norm psychology is even more diverse (...) than what Heyes proposes. Here, though, we focus on Heyes’s conceptual critique of the nativist model and its explanatory target—namely, a system for representing and processing rules. Heyes’s criticism of this representational rule-based conception of the psychology of norms is quite sound. However, we will argue that Heyes’s alternative behavioral explanandum for the psychology of norms also fails to escape the gravitational pull of a rule-based approach. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate about the status of the “Ought Implies Can” principle and the growing body of empirical evidence that undermines it. We report the results of an experimental study which show that people judge that agents ought to perform an action even when they also judge that those agents cannot do it and that such “ought” judgments exhibit an actor-observer effect. Because of this actor-observer effect on “ought” judgments and the Duhem-Quine thesis, talk (...) of an “empirical refutation” of OIC is empirically and methodologically unwarranted. What the empirical fact that people attribute moral obligations to unable agents shows is that OIC is not intuitive, not that OIC has been refuted. (shrink)

how does one inquire into the truth of first principles? Where does one begin when deciding where to begin? Aristotle recognizes a series of difficulties when it comes to understanding the starting points of a scientific or philosophical system, and contemporary scholars have encountered their own difficulties in understanding his response. I will argue that Aristotle was aware of a Platonic solution that can help us uncover his own attitude toward the problem.Aristotle's central problem with first principles arises from the (...) fact that they cannot be demonstrated in the same way as other propositions. Since demonstrations proceed from prior and better-known principles, if the principles themselves were in need of... (shrink)

Amartya Sen has recently leveled a series of what he alleges to be quite serious very general objections against Rawls, Rawlsian fellow travelers, and other social contract accounts of justice. In The Idea of Justice, published in 2009, Sen specifically charges his target philosophical views with what calls transcendentalism, procedural parochialism, and with being mistakenly narrowly focused on institutions. He also thinks there is a basic incoherence—arising from a version of Derek Parfit’s Identity Problem—internal to the Rawslian theoretical apparatus. Sen (...) would have political philosophy pursue intersocietal comparisons of relative justice more directly and in the manner of social choice theory. Yet the positive argument he develops in support of this method is quite thin. That aside, Sen’s polemical strategy of inflicting death by a thousand cuts is ineffective against the Rawlsian paradigm. For, as I show herein, none of these criticisms have the force we might be led to expect. (shrink)

This paper is a test case for the claim, made famous by Myles Burnyeat, that the ancient Greeks did not recognize subjective truth or knowledge. After a brief discussion of the issue in Sextus Empiricus, I then turn to Plato's discussion of Protagorean views in the Theaetetus. In at least two passages, it seems that Plato attributes to Protagoras the view that our subjective experiences constitute truth and knowledge, without reference to any outside world of objects. I argue that these (...) passages have been misunderstood and that on the correct reading, they do not say anything about subjective knowledge. I then try out what I take to be the correct reading of the passages. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the importance of causes in Greek epistemology. (shrink)

Plato's Theaetetus discusses and ultimately rejects Protagoras's famous claim that "man is the measure of all things." The most famous of Plato's arguments is the Self-Refutation Argument. But he offers a number of other arguments as well, including one that I call the 'Future Argument.' This argument, which appears at Theaetetus 178a−179b, is quite different from the earlier Self-Refutation Argument. I argue that it is directed mainly at a part of the Protagorean view not addressed before , namely, that all (...) beliefs concerning one's own future sensible qualities are true. This part of the view is found to be inconsistent with Protagoras's own conception of wisdom as expertise and with his own pretenses at expertise in teaching. (shrink)

Plato’s Parmenides and Lysis have a surprising amount in common from a methodological standpoint. Both systematically employ a method that I call ‘exploring both sides’, a philosophical method for encouraging further inquiry and comprehensively understanding the truth. Both have also been held in suspicion by interpreters for containing what looks uncomfortably similar to sophistic methodology. I argue that the methodological connections across these and other dialogues relieve those suspicions and push back against a standard developmentalist story about Plato’s method. This (...) allows for a better understanding of why exploring both sides is explicitly recommended in the Parmenides and its role within Plato’s broader methodological repertoire. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to test empirically an idea that many philosophers find intuitive, namely that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. Many philosophers find it intuitive that moral agents are responsible only if they know the particular facts surrounding their action. Our results show that whether moral agents are aware of the facts surrounding their action does have an effect on people’s attributions of blame, regardless of the consequences or side effects of the agent’s actions. In general, it was (...) more likely that a situationally aware agent will be blamed for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. We also tested attributions of forgiveness in addition to attributions of blame. In general, it was less likely that a situationally aware agent will be forgiven for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. When the agent is situationally unaware, it is more likely that the agent will be forgiven than blamed. We argue that these results provide some empirical support for the hypothesis that there is something intuitive about the idea that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the central problem of Aristotle’s Metaphysics H (VIII) 6 is the unity of forms and that he solves this problem in just the way he solves the problem of the unity of composites – by hylomorphism. I also discuss the matter– form relationship in H 6, arguing that they have a correlative nature as the matter of the form and the form of the matter.

Many widely divergent accounts of luck have been offered or employed in discussing an equally wide range of philosophical topics. We should, then, expect to find some unified philosophical conception of luck of which moral luck, epistemic luck, and luck egalitarianism are species. One of the attempts to provide such an account is that offered by Duncan Pritchard, which he refers to as the modal account. This view commits us to calling an event lucky when it obtains in this world, (...) but fails to obtain in a wide class of nearby possible worlds. In support of this account, Pritchard argues that a theory of luck ought to capture the fact that luck comes in degrees and that luck is closely associated with risk. I argue against this claim by suggesting that an understanding of luck grounded in considerations of probability is better able to satisfy these demands, and that the probability theory better explains exemplary cases of luck like those brought up by Pritchard. (shrink)

The paper examines some doctrines of the Davidsonian Programme of truth conditional Semantics that relates truth to meaning using Tarski’s T-Convention, in relation to its efficacy in a semantic valuation of the EkeGusii proverb: Nda ’indongi ereta morogi ereta moibi which exemplifies a kind of complex sentence that a given system of Semantics is meant to account for. The coverage of Davidsonian truth-conditional notion of T-convention and that of compositionality are considered to have only a partial reach in accounting for (...) the meaning of the proverb by not incorporating pragmatic aspects. The failure of T-convention is not alleviated by the adoption of radical interpretation as posited by Davidson but is extended to consider aspects of pragmatic enrichment and dynamic Semantics. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a novel theory for why we find certain mundane everyday experiences, objects, and phenomena satisfying aesthetic experiences. I refer to these as 'oddly satisfying' experiences, and argue that they assert themselves as aesthetic by being suggestive of the cinematic. This cinematic quality is the product of everyday experiences gesturing towards a kind of careful artistic intent.