Artificial intelligence (AI) research enjoyed an initial period of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s. But this enthusiasm was tempered by a long interlude of frustration when genuinely useful AI applications failed to be forthcoming. Today, we are experiencing once again a period of enthusiasm, fired above all by the successes of the technology of deep neural networks or deep machine learning. In this paper we draw attention to what we take to be serious problems underlying current views of artificial (...) intelligence encouraged by these successes, especially in the domain of language processing. We then show an alternative approach to language-centric AI, in which we identify a role for philosophy. (shrink)

Sam Harris is a contemporary illustration of the difficulties standing in the way of coherent interdisciplinary thinking in an age where science and the humanities have drifted so far apart. We are here with Harris’s views on AI, and specifically with his view according to which, with the advance of AI, there will evolve a machine superintelligence with powers that far exceed those of the human mind. This he sees as something that is not merely possible, but rather a matter (...) of inevitability. If, however, we look carefully at what intelligence is, and at how computers really work on the basis of mathematical models, then we can see that it is forever impossible to emulate inside a computer even the intelligence of crows or rabbits, let alone that of human beings. (shrink)

Health Level 7 (HL7) is an international standards development organisation in the domain of healthcare information technology. Initially the mission of HL7 was to enable data exchange via the creation of syntactic standards which supported point-to-point messaging. Currently HL7 sees its mission as one of creating standards for semantic interoperability in healthcare IT on the basis of its flagship “version 3” (v3). Unfortunately, v3 has been plagued by quality and consistency issues, and it has not been able to keep pace (...) with recent developments either in semantics and ontology or in computer science and engineering. HL7’s response has been to develop its “Services-Aware Interoperability Framework” (SAIF), which is intended to provide a foundation for work on all aspects of standardization in HL7 henceforth. We here summarise the major design principles that must be satisfied by a semantic interoperability framework – principles relating both to static semantics and to computational behaviour. We then assess the SAIF in light of these principles. We conclude that the SAIF is not in a position to support the needed reform of the HL7 v3 family of standards. (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal (...) evidence from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

The goal of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – or in other words of creating Turing machines (modern computers) that can behave in a way that mimics human intelligence – has occupied AI researchers ever since the idea of AI was first proposed. One common theme in these discussions is the thesis that the ability of a machine to conduct convincing dialogues with human beings can serve as at least a sufficient criterion of AGI. We argue that this very ability (...) should be accepted also as a necessary condition of AGI, and we provide a description of the nature of human dialogue in particular and of human language in general against this background. We then argue that it is for mathematical reasons impossible to program a machine in such a way that it could master human dialogue behaviour in its full generality. This is (1) because there are no traditional explicitly designed mathematical models that could be used as a starting point for creating such programs; and (2) because even the sorts of automated models generated by using machine learning, which have been used successfully in areas such as machine translation, cannot be extended to cope with human dialogue. If this is so, then we can conclude that a Turing machine also cannot possess AGI, because it fails to fulfil a necessary condition thereof. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the potential of Turing machines to master dialogue behaviour in highly restricted contexts, where what is called “narrow” AI can still be of considerable utility. (shrink)

We comment on the collection of papers inspired by our book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World published in volume 12 (5+6) of the journal Cosmos+Taxis. We summarize the arguments made by the contributors about what we say in the book, and then show where we disagree.

Implicit stochastic models, including both ‘deep neural networks’ (dNNs) and the more recent unsupervised foundational models, cannot be explained. That is, it cannot be determined how they work, because the interactions of the millions or billions of terms that are contained in their equations cannot be captured in the form of a causal model. Because users of stochastic AI systems would like to understand how they operate in order to be able to use them safely and reliably, there has emerged (...) a new field called ‘explainable AI’ (XAI). When we examine the XAI literature, however, it becomes apparent that its protagonists have redefined the term ‘explanation’ to mean something else, namely: ‘interpretation’. Interpretations are indeed sometimes possible, but we show that they give at best only a subjective understanding of how a model works. We propose an alternative to XAI, namely certified AI (CAI), and describe how an AI can be specified, realized, and tested in order to become certified. The resulting approach combines ontologies and formal logic with statistical learning to obtain reliable AI systems which can be safely used in technical applications. (shrink)

The view of nature we adopt in the natural attitude is determined by common sense, without which we could not survive. Classical physics is modelled on this common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural understanding of the causes and effects we observe in time and space when we select subsystems of nature for modelling. But in modern physics, we do not go beyond the realm of common sense by augmenting our knowledge of what is going on (...) in nature. Rather, we have measurements that we do not understand, so we know nothing about the ontology of what we measure. We help ourselves by using entities from mathematics, which we fully understand ontologically. But we have no ontology of the reality of modern physics; we have only what we can assert mathematically. In this paper, we describe the ontology of classical and modern physics against this background and show how it relates to the ontology of common sense and of mathematics. (shrink)

Barry Smith recently discussed the diagraphs of book eight of Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas scholastica under the heading “birth of ontology” (Smith, 2022; this issue). Here, I highlight the commonalities between the original usage of diagraphs in the tradition of Ramus for didactic purposes and the the usage of their present-day successors–modern ontologies–for computational purposes. The modern ideas of ontology and of the universal computer were born just two generations apart in the breakthrough century of instrumental reason.

Andrea Cesalpino is an important figure in the history of science. He demonstrated that blood circulates into heart from veins and from the heart to arteries, paving the way to Harvey’s complete description of blood circulation. Moreover, he was the founder of botany as a systematic discipline, which he based, rather than on the observation of accidental similarities of plants, on the discovery of their vegetative-generative principle. In philosophy, he attempted to conciliate the immortality of the soul (i.e., the (...) form of the body) with the existence of a unique immaterial intellect, which is individuated and multiplied in the singular souls that participate to it. (shrink)

Some defenders of so-called `artificial intelligence' believe that machines can understand language. In particular, Søgaard has argued in his "Understanding models understanding language" (2022) for a thesis of this sort. His idea is that (1) where there is semantics there is also understanding and (2) machines are not only capable of what he calls `inferential semantics', but even that they can (with the help of inputs from sensors) `learn' referential semantics. We show that he goes wrong because he pays insufficient (...) attention to the difference between language as used by humans and the sequences of inert symbols which arise when language is stored on hard drives or in books in libraries. (shrink)

Since the noun phrase `artificial intelligence' (AI) was coined, it has been debated whether humans are able to create intelligence using technology. We shed new light on this question from the point of view of themodynamics and mathematics. First, we define what it is to be an agent (device) that could be the bearer of AI. Then we show that the mainstream definitions of `intelligence' proposed by Hutter and others and still accepted by the AI community are too weak even (...) to capture what is involved when we ascribe intelligence to an insect. We then summarise the highly useful definition of basic (arthropod) intelligence proposed by Rodney Brooks, and we identify the properties that an AI agent would need to possess in order to be the bearer of intelligence by this definition. Finally, we show that, from the perspective of the disciplines needed to create such an agent, namely mathematics and physics, these properties are realisable by neither implicit nor explicit mathematical design nor by setting up an environment in which an AI could evolve spontaneously. (shrink)

Transcript of an Interview on the podcast: Irreverend: Faith and Current Affairs.

The term ‘intelligence’ as used in this paper refers to items of knowledge collected for the sake of assessing and maintaining national security. The intelligence community (IC) of the United States (US) is a community of organizations that collaborate in collecting and processing intelligence for the US. The IC relies on human-machine-based analytic strategies that 1) access and integrate vast amounts of information from disparate sources, 2) continuously process this information, so that, 3) a maximally comprehensive understanding of world actors (...) and their behaviors can be developed and updated. Herein we describe an approach to utilizing outcomes-based learning (OBL) to support these efforts that is based on an ontology of the cognitive processes performed by intelligence analysts. Of particular importance to the Cognitive Process Ontology is the class Representation that is Warranted. Such a representation is descriptive in nature and deserving of trust in its veridicality. The latter is because a Representation that is Warranted is always produced by a process that was vetted (or successfully designed) to reliably produce veridical representations. As such, Representations that are Warranted are what in other contexts we might refer to as ‘items of knowledge’. (shrink)

Das in diesem Aufsatz vorgebrachte Argumentationsmuster hat folgende Schritte: 1. Der menschliche Geist ist vom Körper nicht trennbar, sie bilden ein Kontinuum. 2. Unser Bewusstsein und alle darauf aufbauenden geistigen Phänomene sind die Emanation eines materiellen Prozesses, den ein komplexes System verursacht. 3. Komplexe Systeme lassen sich mathematisch nicht modellieren und nicht kausal verstehen. 4. Computer sind Turing-Maschinen. Sie können nur mathematische Modelle berechnen. Es wird niemals Hyper-Turing Maschinen geben, und wenn es sie gäbe, könnten sie auch nur mathematische Modelle (...) berechnen. 5. Es ist nicht möglich, den Körper als Substrat des Geistes durch einen Computer zu ersetzen. Die digitale Unsterblichkeit ist demzufolge ein Ding der Unmöglichkeit. (shrink)

In his “Bridging mainstream and formal ontology”, Augusto (2021) gives an excellent analysis of Dietrich von Freiberg’s idea of using causality as a partitioning principle for upper ontologies. For this Dietrich’s notion of extrinsic principles is crucial. The question whether causation can and indeed should be used as a partitioning principle for ontologies is discussed using mathematics and physics as examples.

The aim of this chapter is to articulate the ways in which our social standing, and particularly our socio-economic status (SES), affects, even transforms, the experience of boredom. Even if boredom can be said to be democratic, in the sense that it can potentially affect all of us, it does not actually affect all of us in the same way. Boredom, I argue, is unjust—some groups are disproportionately negatively impacted by boredom through no fault of their own. Depending on our (...) social position and self and others’ perceptions of our SES, we can experience it more frequently, more intensely, and in ways that either leave us incapable of alleviating it or push us to harmful and maladaptive responses to it. Hence, seen in a socio-economic light, boredom can become a serious threat to our physical and psychological well-being. Insofar as freedom to pursue and achieve one’s well-being is essential to human life and a primary concern of contemporary liberal societies, boredom should be considered to be a social justice issue. The disproportionately negative effects of boredom on lower SES groups indicate the profound ways that boredom affects individuals and further disadvantages those who are already in marginalized positions. Contrary to many historical accounts, boredom is not only the experience of the elite, the wealthy, or those with ample free time. In our current political, social, and economic climate, boredom is primarily the experience of the less privileged, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized. (shrink)

I respond to Chalmers’ (2006, 2010) objection to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) by showing that his objection is faced with a dilemma that ultimately undercuts its force. Chalmers argues that no version of PCS can posit psychological features that are both physically explicable and capable of explaining our epistemic situation. In response, I show that what Chalmers calls ‘our epistemic situation’ admits either of a phenomenal or of a topic-neutral characterization, neither of which supports Chalmers’ objection. On the one (...) hand, if our epistemic situation is characterized phenomenally, then Chalmers’ demand that PCS should explain our epistemic situation is misplaced. PCS can explain our epistemic situation only if there is a reductive explanation of consciousness. But according to PCS, no reductive explanation of consciousness can be given. On the other hand, if our epistemic situation is characterized topic-neutrally, then PCS is not only physically explicable, but it also explains our epistemic situation. Either way, PCS is safe. (shrink)

In the luck egalitarian literature, one influential formulation of luck egalitarianism does not specify whether equalities that do not reflect people’s equivalent exercises of responsibility are bad with regard to inequality. This equivocation gives rise to two competing versions of luck egalitarianism: asymmetrical and symmetrical luck egalitarianism. According to the former, while inequalities due to luck are unjust, equalities due to luck are not necessarily so. The latter view, by contrast, affirms the undesirability of equalities as well as inequalities insofar (...) as they are due to luck. The symmetrical view, we argue, is by far the more compelling, both by internal luck egalitarian standards and in light of the external rightist emphasis on choice and responsibility to which luck egalitarianism may partly be seen as a response. Our main case for the symmetrical view is that when some people, against a background of equal opportunities, do not exercise their responsibility to the same degree as others, they cannot justifiably call for equalizing measures to be put in place. Indeed, such measures would be positively unfair. The symmetrical view, accordingly, rejects compensation in such cases, whereas the asymmetrical view, implausibly, enjoins it. We also examine two objections to this argument. First, that this view fails to qualify as genuinely egalitarian, instead collapsing the notion of equality into the notion of desert. Second, that the opposing asymmetrical view, in contrast to the symmetrical view, can draw support from its compatibility with sufficientarian concerns. Both objections are rebutted. We conclude that luck egalitarians are best served by endorsing the symmetrical, luck-neutralizing stance. (shrink)

We address the question whether there is an explanation for the fact that as Fodor put it the micro-level “converges on stable macro-level properties”, and whether there are lessons from this explanation for other issues in the vicinity. We argue that stability in large systems can be understood in terms of statistical limit theorems. In the thermodynamic limit of infinite system size N → ∞ systems will have strictly stable macroscopic properties in the sense that transitions between different macroscopic phases (...) of matter (if there are any) will not occur in finite time. Indeed stability in this sense is a consequence of the absence of fluctuations, as (large) fluctuations would be required to induce such macroscopic transformations. These properties can be understood in terms of coarse-grained descriptions, and the statistical limit theorems for independent or weakly dependent random variable describing the behaviour averages and the statistics of fluctuations in the large system limit. We argue that RNG analyses applied to off-critical systems can provide a rationalization for the applicability of these limit theorems. Furthermore we discuss some related issues as, for example, the role of the infinite-system idealization. (shrink)

Given certain well-known observations by Mach and Russell, the question arises what place there is for causation in the physical world. My aim in this chapter is to understand under what conditions we can use causal terminology and how it fi ts in with what physics has to say. I will argue for a disposition-based process-theory of causation. After addressing Mach’s and Russell’s concerns I will start by outlining the kind of problem the disposition based process-theory of causation is meant (...) to solve. In a second step I will discuss the nature of those dispositions that will be relevant for our question. In section 3 I will discuss existing dispositional accounts of causation before I proceed to present my own account (sections 4 to 6) and contrast it with traditional process-theories (section 7). (shrink)

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, A. J. Ayer was an analytic philosopher who had sustained throughout his career some interest in developments in the work of his ‘continental’ peers. Ayer, who spoke French, held friendships with some important Parisian intellectuals, such as Camus, Bataille, Wahl and Merleau-Ponty. This paper examines the circumstances of a meeting between Ayer, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl, Ambrosino and Bataille, which took place in 1951 at some Parisian bar. The question under discussion during this meeting was (...) whether the sun existed before humans did, over which the various philosophers disagreed. This disagreement is tangled with a variety of issues, such as Ayer’s critique of Heidegger and Sartre, Ayer’s response to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of empiricism, and Bataille’s response to Sartre’s critique of his notion of ‘unknowing’, which uncannily resembles Ayer’s critique of Sartre. Amidst this tangle one finds Bataille’s statement that an ‘abyss’ separates English from French and German philosophy, the first recorded announcement of the analytic-continental divide in the twentieth century. (shrink)

In his recent article, titled ‘Royaumont Revisited’, Overgaard challenges Dummett's view that one needs to go as far back as the late nineteenth century in order to discover examples of genuine dialogue between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy. Instead, Overgaard argues that in the 1958 Royaumont colloquium, generally judged as a failed attempt at communication between the two camps, one can find some elements which may be utilized towards re-establishing a dialogue between these two sides. Yet, emphasising this image of Royaumont (...) as a kind of battleground between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy obscures the plurality of philosophical approaches involved. Royaumont was the meeting point of more than two philosophical traditions, as can be shown by the divergent interests of its participants. Thus, though the potential for rapprochement between Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’ and a certain strand of phenomenological thought may indeed be found among the discussions that took place during the colloquium, one should keep in mind that such rapprochement took place in the context of a meeting between, among others: continental ‘analytics’, Anglophone non-‘analytics’, French historians of philosophy, ‘analytic’ opponents of Oxford philosophy, Franciscan phenomenologists, and Oxonians who called their work ‘phenomenology’. (shrink)

Selim Berker argues that particularists do not have a coherent notion of reasons for action because they cannot show that contributory reasons always contribute to overall reason or moral judgments in accordance with their valence. I argue that Berker fails to demonstrate that particularists cannot show this to be the case. He also wrongly assumes that they need to know this to be the case to legitimately speak of reasons for action. Furthermore, Jonathan Dancy’s account of practical reasoning explains how (...) particularists can legitimately speak of reasons for action while claiming that reasons sometimes make contributions contrary to their valence. (shrink)

This paper aims to discuss Spinoza’s theory of consciousness by arguing that consciousness is the expression of bodily complexity in terms of adequate knowledge. Firstly, I present the link that Spinoza built up in the second part of the Ethics between the ability of the mind to know itself and the idea ideae theory. Secondly, I present in what sense consciousness turns out to be the result of an adequate knowledge emerging from the epistemological resources of a body as complex (...) as the human one. Thirdly, I address a possible objection that might arise in considering our daily-life experience of consciousness. I conclude that understanding consciousness in terms of adequate knowledge is coherent with both our phenomenological experience and Spinoza’s texts. Such an interpretation permits to underline the overthrow of Descartes’ account of consciousness by Spinoza. (shrink)

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

El kitsch no es solo una categoría que ha definido una de las posibles gramáticas estéticas de la modernidad, sino también una dimensión antropológica que ha tenido diferentes configuraciones en el curso de los procesos históricos. El ensayo ofrece una mirada histórico-crítica sobre las transformaciones que condujeron desde el kitsch de principios del siglo XX hasta el neokitsch contemporáneo: desde la génesis del kitsch hasta su afirmación como una de las manifestaciones más tangibles de la cultura de masas. Integrándose con (...) la estética posmoderna, el kitsch se transforma en neokitsch, una estética que utiliza el kitsch como su propia sintaxis en el complejo escenario de la estética contemporánea. /// -/- Kitsch is not just a category that has defined one of the possible aesthetic grammars of modernity, but also an anthropological dimension that has had different configurations in the course of historical processes. The essay offers a historical-critical look at the transformations that led from the early twentieth century kitsch to the contemporary neokitsch: from the genesis of kitsch to its affirmation as one of the most tangible manifestations of mass culture. Integrating with postmodern aesthetics, kitsch turns into neokitsch, an aesthetic that deliberately uses kitsch as its own syntax in the complex scenario of contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

This article investigates reasons to participate in non-deterministic elections, where the outcomes incorporate elements of chance beyond mere tie-breaking. The background context situates this inquiry within democratic theory, specifically non-deterministic voting systems, which promise to re-evaluate fairness and power distribution among voting blocs. This study aims to explore the normative implications of such electoral systems and their impact on our moral duty to vote. We analyze instrumental reasons for voting, including prudential and act-consequentialist arguments, alongside non-instrumental reasons, assessing their validity (...) in the context of non-deterministic systems. The results indicate that non-deterministic elections could strengthen the case for voting based on prudential and act-consequentialist grounds due to their proportional nature and the increased influence of each vote. We conclude that, while non-deterministic elections strengthen our duty to vote overall, they do not strengthen it for all the arguments in the literature. This paper contributes to the discourse on electoral systems by critically evaluating the moral obligation to vote in non-deterministic elections. (shrink)

There seems to be a minimal core that every theory wishing to accommodate the intuition that the future is open must contain: a denial of physical determinism (i.e. the thesis that what future states the universe will be in is implied by what states it has been in), and a denial of strong fatalism (i.e. the thesis that, at every time, what will subsequently be the case is metaphysically necessary).1 Those two requirements are often associated with the idea of an (...) objective temporal flow and the non-reality of the future. However, at least certain ways to frame the “openness” intuition do not rely on any of these. Branching Time Theory (BTT) is one such: it is compatible with the denial that time flow is objective and it is couched in a language with a (prima facie) commitment to an eternalist ontology. BTT, though, urges us to resist certain intuitions about the determinacy of future claims, which arguably do not lead either to physical determinism or to fatalism. Against BTT, supporters of the Thin Red Line Theory (TRL) argue that their position avoids determinism and fatalism, while also representing the fact that there is a future which is “special” because it is the one that will be the case. But starting with Belnap and Green 1994, some have objected to the tenability of TRL, mainly on metaphysical grounds. In particular, those argue that “positing a thin red line amounts to giving up objective indeterminism,”2 and that “has unacceptable consequences, ranging from a mistreatment of actuality to an inability to talk coherently about what would have happened had what is going to happen not taken place.”3 In this paper, we wish to reframe the.. (shrink)

I argue that Manzotti and Pepperell’s presentation of the New Mind not only obfuscates pertinent differences between externalist views of various strengths, but also, and most problematically, conflates a distinction that cannot, without consequences, be conflated. We can talk about the contents of the mind and/or about the vehicles of those contents. But we should not conflate the two. Conflation of contents and vehicles comes with a price. In Manzotti and Pepperell’s case, it undermines claims they make about the implications (...) of the New Mind. (shrink)

The principle of the causal closure of the physical plays a central role in the philosophy of mind, especially as a premise in arguments for physicalism. In this paper I explore what role the principle can play in the argument for physicalism and whether the evidence we have for the principle allows for such a role or function.

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)

Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on (...) Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too, or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary. (shrink)

Affirmative action is standardly pursued in relation to admissions to prestigious universities, in hiring for prestigious jobs, and when it comes to being elected to parliament. Central to these forms of affirmative action is that they have to do with competitive goods. A good is competitive when, if we improve A’s chances of getting the good, we reduce B’s chances of obtaining the good. I call this Competitive Affirmative Action. I distinguish this from Non-competitive Affirmative Action. The latter has to (...) do with non-competitive goods, e.g., being granted early parole or freedom from arbitrary arrest. I argue that some of the most prominent objections against affirmative action—in particular, the reverse discrimination objection and the merit objection—speak less against Non-competitive Affirmative Action. And that some of the most prominent arguments in favor of affirmative action, insofar as they justify Competitive Affirmative Action, also justify Non-competitive Affirmative Action. (shrink)

This paper employs some outcomes (for the most part due to David Lewis) of the contemporary debate on the metaphysics of dispositions to evaluate those dispositional analyses of meaning that make use of the concept of a disposition in ideal conditions. The first section of the paper explains why one may find appealing the notion of an ideal-condition dispositional analysis of meaning and argues that Saul Kripke’s well-known argument against such analyses is wanting. The second section focuses on Lewis’ work (...) in the metaphysics of dispositions in order to call attention to some intuitions about the nature of dispositions that we all seem to share. In particular, I stress the role of what I call "Actuality Constraint". The third section of the paper maintains that the Actuality Constraint can be used to show that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist (in so doing, I develop a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian). This immediately implies that ideal-condition dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work. The last section discusses a possible objection to my argument. The point of the objection is that the argument depends on an illicit assumption. I show (1) that, in fact, the assumption in question is far from illicit and (2) that even without this assumption it is possible to argue that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre‐theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.

While contemporary accounts understand esteem and self-esteem as essentially competitive phenomena, early modern natural law theorists developed a conception of justified esteem and self-esteem based on naturally good character traits. This article explores how such a normative conception of esteem and self-esteem is developed in the work of Christian Wolff. Two features make Wolff’s approach distinctive: He uses the analysis of common notions that are expressed in everyday language to provide a foundation for the aspects of natural law on which (...) his conception of natural duties of esteem depends. He develops a non-competitive conception of esteem and self-esteem into a cooperative conception, according to which enhancing the esteem in which others are held is seen as a tool for promoting self-perfection. Wolff’s ideas offer a solution to the well-known problems connected with competitive life-styles, and at the same time assign a central role in moral motivation to the desire of being esteemed and of having high self-esteem. Moreover, due to his emphasis on presenting a philosophical analysis based on common notions, he offers a solution that is meant to be persuasive from the perspective of everyday morality. (shrink)

The problem of intentional inexistence arises because the following (alleged) intuitions are mutually conflicting: it seems that sometimes we think about things that do not exist; it seems that intentionality is a relation between a thinker and what such a thinker thinks about; it seems that relations entail the existence of what they relate. In this paper, I argue for what I call a radical relationist solution. First, I contend that the extant arguments for the view that relations entail the (...) existence of their relata are wanting. In this regard, I defend a kind of pluralism about relations according to which more than one kind of relation involves non-existents. Second, I contend that there are reasons to maintain that all thoughts are relations between thinkers and the things they are about. More accurately, I contend that the radical relationist solution is to be preferred to both the intentional content solution (as developed by Crane) and the adverbial property solution (as developed by Kriegel). Finally, I argue that once the distinction between thinking “X” and thinking about X has been drawn, the radical relationist solution can handle issues like ontological commitment, substitutivity failure, scrutability, and non-specificity. (shrink)

It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally (...) to deserve to feel guilty. Being blamed by someone else is not necessarily harmful to the wrongdoer. The blame might not be expressed, or the wrongdoer might not care. But to blame oneself necessarily involves suffering. This conception of blameworthiness explains why the control condition should obtain: We are morally blameworthy for A only if A was under our control because to be blameworthy is to deserve to feel guilty, to feel guilty is to suffer, and one deserves to suffer for A only if A was under one’s control. (shrink)

This paper argues that most of the alleged straight solutions to the sceptical paradox which Kripke ascribed to Wittgenstein can be regarded as the first horn of a dilemma whose second horn is the paradox itself. The dilemma is proved to be a by‐product of a foundationalist assumption on the notion of justification, as applied to linguistic behaviour. It is maintained that the assumption is unnecessary and that the dilemma is therefore spurious. To this end, an alternative conception of the (...) justification of linguistic behaviour is outlined, a conception that vindicates some of the insights behind Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical solution of the paradox. This alternative conception is defended against two objections (both familiar from McDowell's works): (1) that it would imply that for the linguistic community there is no authority, no standard to meet and, therefore, no possibility of error and (2) that it would lead to a kind of idealism. (shrink)

This paper considers the argument according to which, because we should regard it as a priori very unlikely that we are among the most important people who will ever exist, we should increase our confidence that the human species will not persist beyond the current historical era, which seems to represent a crucial juncture in human history and perhaps even the history of life on earth. The argument is a descendant of the Carter-Leslie Doomsday Argument, but I show that it (...) does not inherit the crucial flaw in its immediate ancestor. Nonetheless, we are not forced to follow the argument where it leads if we instead significantly decrease our confidence that we can affect the long-run future of humanity. GPI Working Paper No. 1-2019. (shrink)

In `Essence and Modality', Kit Fine proposes that for a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for it to be true in virtue of the nature of all objects whatsoever. Call this view Fine's Thesis. This paper is a study of Fine's Thesis in the context of Fine's logic of essence (LE). Fine himself has offered his most elaborate defense of the thesis in the context of LE. His defense rests on the widely shared assumption that metaphysical necessity obeys the (...) laws of the modal logic S5. In order to get S5 for metaphysical necessity, he assumes a controversial principle about the nature of all objects. I will show that the addition of this principle to his original system E5 leads to inconsistency with an independently plausible principle about essence. In response, I develop a theory that avoids this inconsistency while allowing us to maintain S5 for meta- physical necessity. However, I conclude that our investigation of Fine's Thesis in the context of LE motivates the revisionary conclusion that metaphysical necessity obeys the principles of the modal logic S4, but not those of S5. I argue that this constitutes a distinctively essentialist challenge to the received view that the logic of metaphysical necessity is S5. (shrink)

This paper explores an idea of Stoic descent that is largely neglected nowadays, the idea that an argument is valid when the conditional formed by the conjunction of its premises as antecedent and its conclusion as consequent is true. As it will be argued, once some basic features of our naıve understanding of validity are properly spelled out, and a suitable account of conditionals is adopted, the equivalence between valid arguments and true conditionals makes perfect sense. The account of validity (...) outlined here, which displays one coherent way to articulate the Stoic intuition, accords with standard formal treatments of deductive validity and encompasses an independently grounded characterization of inductive validity. (shrink)

I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving (...) the value of the long-term future. Reflecting on the demands of beneficence in respect of the value of the far future forces us to view key aspects of the problem of moral demandingness in a very different light. GPI Working Paper No. 1-2020. (shrink)