Permissivist metaontology proposes answering customary existence questions in the affirmative. Many of the existence questions addressed by ontologists concern the existence of theoretical entities which admit precise formal specification. This causes trouble for the permissivist, since individually consistent formal theories can make pairwise inconsistent demands on the cardinality of the universe. We deploy a result of Gabriel Uzquiano’s to show that this possibility is realised in the case of two prominent existence debates and propose rejecting permissivism in favour of substantive (...) ontology conducted on a cost–benefit basis. (shrink)

Marine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from human activity, yet successful management relies on knowledge. The evidence-based policy (EBP) approach has been promoted on the grounds that it provides greater transparency and consistency by relying on ‘high quality’ information. However, EBP also creates epistemic responsibilities. Decision-making where limited or no empirical evidence exists, such as is often the case in marine systems, creates epistemic obligations for new information acquisition. We argue that philosophical approaches can inform the science-policy interface. Using marine (...) biosecurity examples, we specifically examine the epistemic challenges in the acquisition and acceptance of evidence to inform policy, discussing epistemic due care and biases in consideration of evidence. (shrink)

There is no interesting entailment either way between theism and various forms of realism. Taking its cue from Dummett's characterisation of realism and his discussion of it with respect to theistic belief, this paper argues both that theism does not follow from realism, and that God cannot be appealed to in order to secure bivalence for an otherwise indeterminate subject matter. In both cases, significant appeal is made to the position that God is not a language user, which in turn (...) is motivated by an account of understanding as aptitude possession. The resulting picture sits comfortably with the apophatism common within living religious traditions and with the view that the philosophy of religion ought to reorientate itself away from metaphysics towards more practical questions. (shrink)

It is often assumed that pluralities are rigid, in the sense of having all and only their actual members necessarily. This assumption is operative in standard approaches to modal plural logic. I argue that a sceptical approach towards the assumption is warranted.

ABSTRACTThe doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist presents a particular challenge to its defenders: how is it so much as intelligible? This paper explores Dummett’s response to this question, centred on the notion of deeming. Whilst instructive, Dummett’s position is unsustainable as it stands, since it fails to secure the meaningfulness of the doctrine. Once deeming is brought together with an account of bodiliness and an appreciation of the nature of the Eucharist as a meal, however, (...) the way is open to demonstrating the intelligibility of the doctrine. This is a prerequisite even for its rejection as false. (shrink)

We can introduce singular terms for ordered pairs by means of an abstraction principle. Doing so proves useful for a number of projects in the philosophy of mathematics. However there is a question whether we can appeal to the abstraction principle in good faith, since a version of the Caesar Problem can be generated, posing the worry that abstraction fails to introduce expressions which refer determinately to the requisite sort of object. In this note I will pose the difficulty, and (...) then propose a solution. Since my solution appeals to a plausible constraint on the introduction of new expressions to a language, it is of interest independently of the particular case of terms for pairs. Since these provide the occasion for discussion we should nonetheless review the use of abstraction for pairs before the argumentative business of the paper commences. (shrink)

There is no interesting entailment either way between theism and various forms of realism. Taking its cue from Dummett’s characterisation of realism and his discussion of it with respect to theistic belief, this paper argues both that theism does not follow from realism, and that God cannot be appealed to in order to secure bivalence for an otherwise indeterminate subject matter. In both cases, significant appeal is made to the position that God is not a language user, which in turn (...) is motivated by an account of understanding as aptitude possession. The resulting picture sits comfortably with the apophatism common within living religious traditions and with the view that the philosophy of religion ought to reorientate itself away from metaphysics towards more practical questions. (shrink)

It is argued that Gabriel Uzquiano's approach to set-theoretic indefinite extensibility is a version of in rebus structuralism, and therefore suffers from a vacuity problem.

Wicked problems are tricky to solve because of their many interconnected components and a lack of any single optimal solution. At the science–policy interface, all problems can look wicked: research exposes the complexity that is relevant to designing, executing and implementing policy fit for ambitious human needs. Expertise in philosophical research can help to navigate that complexity.

When evidence-based policymaking is so often mired in disagreement and controversy, how can we know if the process is meeting its stated goals? We develop a novel mathematical model to study disagreements about adequate knowledge utilization, like those regarding wild horse culling, shark drumlines and facemask policies during pandemics. We find that, when stakeholders disagree, it is frequently impossible to tell whether any party is at fault. We demonstrate the need for a distinctive kind of transparency in evidence-based policymaking, which (...) we call transparency of reasoning. Such transparency is critical to the success of the evidence-based policy movement, as without it, we will be unable to tell whether in any instance a policy was in fact based on evidence. (shrink)

In Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s Faust, author Ben Hewitt has provided us with a carefully done and convincing study. Given this, it would have been interesting to see Hewitt’s effort to integrate Mary Shelley’s work into his narrative. Apart from any similarities between Faust and Frankenstein, it bears remembering that Goethe himself remained unconvinced by efforts to clearly demarcate works as “tragic” or “epic”; a fact that becomes especially clear in the number of works he’d devoted to rewriting (...) the story of Prometheus. One cannot help but wish that Hewitt had considered the connection between these works and Shelley’s own “Modern Prometheus” in juxtaposition to his reading of P.B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, for this would have made for an especially good ending to Hewitt’s story. Wayne Deakin’s consideration of Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition does indeed close with a brief consideration of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus, but this comes only at the end of a much longer set of considerations. In this book Deakin adopts a similar strategy as that of Hewitt, namely, foregoing any historical recovery of Hegel’s direct influence on the English Romantics—in Deakin’s case, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley—to focus instead on a reading of key poetic works in concert with their Hegelian framework. This reading essentially flows from Deakin’s effort to rethink Hegel’s relatively early notion of self-consciousness through his late lectures on aesthetics. For Deakin, this leads to “aesthetic recognition”; a situating of the self in relation to the world that remains in tension so far as the subject’s drive for autonomy will automatically be humbled by its reception of and to alterity—be that other “Nature” or other subject. (shrink)

I reply to criticisms from Duetz and Dentith, Basham, and Hewitt. I argue that the central disputes on this topic concern how ordinary people understand conspiracy theories and how to evaluate concrete conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

This paper connects information with computation and cognition via concept of agents that appear at variety of levels of organization of physical/chemical/cognitive systems – from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, life-like chemical systems, to cognitive systems starting with living cells, up to organisms and ecologies. In order to obtain this generalized framework, concepts of information, computation and cognition are generalized. In this framework, nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics, where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the (...) potential information of the world to actualize. Starting from the definition of information as the difference in one physical system that makes a difference in another physical system – which combines Bateson and Hewitt’s definitions, the argument is advanced for natural computation as a computational model of the dynamics of the physical world, where information processing is constantly going on, on a variety of levels of organization. This setting helps us to elucidate the relationships between computation, information, agency and cognition, within the common conceptual framework, with special relevance for biology and robotics. (shrink)