It may come as a surprise to readers familiar with the life and work of the Arts Master that he discusses the Eucharist at all. As he likes to remind us, theological topics are generally out of his wheelhouse. Even so, in his Questions on the “Metaphysics” of Aristotle (QM) 4.6, Buridan takes the sacrament of the Eucharist as a key data point in his discussion of Aristotle’s Categories. In the Eucharist, the accidents of the bread and wine—their color, texture, (...) and so on—remain intact, but the underlying substance is transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. Accordingly, God can preserve accidents independent of their underlying substance. Therefore, for our part we can use accidental terms, like whiteness, without connoting any substances, like communion bread. Moreover, it follows that, contrary to Aristotle, substance and the accidental categories are not the most general genera. Instead, being (ens) is, as Buridan concludes. Here, I trace Buridan’s thought on the metaphysical and semantic matters of substance in light of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is for him not only a theological truth, but a metaphysical and semantic datum as well. I conclude by asking why Buridan did not take any and all questions about the Eucharist to be out of his ken. What does this tell us about his attitude toward theology? This paper also includes, as an appendix, the first ever English translation of the question under discussion (QM 4.6): “Does the term being (ens) signify substances and accidents by one single concept or notion?”. (shrink)

Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among (...) the members of the consensus community. I address the question of under what conditions it is likely that a consensus is in fact knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is likely to be knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus, and I identify three conditions—social calibration, apparent consilience of evidence, and social diversity, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that values “fill the logical gap” of underdetermination of theory by evidence, namely, values affect our choice between two or more theories that fit the same evidence. The underdetermination model, however, does not exhaust the roles values play in evidential reasoning. I introduce WAVE – a novel account of the logical relations between values and evidence. WAVE states that values influence evidential reasoning by adjusting evidential weights. I argue that the weight-adjusting role of values is distinct (...) from their underdetermination gap-filling role. Values adjust weights in three ways. First, values affect our trust in the testimony of others. Second, values influence the evidential thresholds required for justified epistemic judgments. Third, values influence the relative weight of a certain type of evidence within a body of multimodal discordant evidence. WAVE explains, from an epistemic perspective, rather than psychological, how smokers, for example, can find the same evidence about the dangers of smoking less persuasive than non-smokers. WAVE allows for a wider effect of values on our accepted scientific theories and beliefs than the effect for which the underdetermination model allows alone; therefore, science studies scholars must consider WAVE in their research and analysis of evidential case studies. (shrink)

People increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered Internet ‎sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing ‎subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users’ reliance on ‎Internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about ‎the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns ‎within standard theories of knowledge and justification. (...) To shed light on the problem, we introduce a ‎novel conceptual framework that clarifies the relations between justified belief, epistemic responsibility, ‎action, and the technological resources available to a subject. We argue that justified belief is subject to ‎certain epistemic responsibilities that accompany the subject’s particular decision-taking circumstances, ‎and that one typical responsibility is to ascertain, so far as one can, whether the information upon which ‎the judgment will rest is biased or incomplete. What this responsibility comprises is partly determined by ‎the inquiry-enabling technologies available to the subject. We argue that a subject’s beliefs that are ‎formed based on Internet-filtered information are less justified than they would be if she either knew how ‎filtering worked or relied on additional sources, and that the subject may have the epistemic ‎responsibility to take measures to enhance the justificatory status of such beliefs.‎. (shrink)

This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations ‎between ‎knowledge ‎and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their ‎own, but ‎also have ‎practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant ‎role in ‎informing public ‎decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. ‎When is a ‎consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may ‎we ‎legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise ‎epistemically ‎justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific inquiry, and (...) if so, what ‎kind of ‎consensus? How should dissent be handled? It is argued that a legitimate inference ‎that a ‎theory is correct from the fact that there is a scientific consensus on it requires taking ‎into ‎consideration both cognitive properties of the theory as well as social properties of ‎the ‎consensus. The last section of the paper reviews computational models of ‎consensus ‎formation.‎. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently argued, against a prevailing orthodoxy, that standards of knowledge partly depend on a subject’s interests; the more is at stake for the subject, the less she is in a position to know. This view, which is dubbed “Pragmatic Encroachment” has historical and conceptual connections to arguments in philosophy of science against the received model of science as value free. I bring the two debates together. I argue that Pragmatic Encroachment and the model of value-laden science reinforce each (...) other. Drawing on Douglas’ argument about the indispensability of value judgments in science, and psychological evidence about people’s inability to objectively reason about what they care about, I introduce a novel argument for Pragmatic Encroachment. (shrink)

This chapter explores properties that bind individuals, knowledge, and communities, together. Section ‎‎1 introduces Hardwig’s argument from trust in others’ testimonies as entailing that trust is the glue ‎that binds individuals into communities. Section 2 asks “what grounds trust?” by exploring assessment ‎of collaborators’ explanatory responsiveness, formal indicators such as affiliation and credibility, ‎appreciation of peers’ tacit knowledge, game-theoretical considerations, and the role moral character ‎of peers, social biases, and social values play in grounding trust. Section 3 deals with establishing (...) ‎reliability standards for formation and breaching of trust. Different epistemic considerations and their ‎underpinning of inductive risks are examined through various communication routes within a ‎discipline, between disciplines, and to the public. Section 4 examines whether a collective entity can ‎be trusted over and above trust that is given to its individual members. Section 5 deals with the roles ‎technological artifacts play in distributed research and collective knowledge. It presents the common ‎view in which genuine trust cannot, in principle, be accorded to artifacts, so as an opposite view. We ‎show that what counts as a genuine object of trust is relevant to debates about the boundaries of ‎collective agency and as a criterion for extended cognitive systems.‎. (shrink)

According to the Value-Neutrality Thesis, technology is morally and politically neutral, neither good nor bad. A knife may be put to bad use to murder an innocent person or to good use to peel an apple for a starving person, but the knife itself is a mere instrument, not a proper subject for moral or political evaluation. While contemporary philosophers of technology widely reject the VNT, it remains unclear whether claims about values in technology are just a figure of speech (...) or nontrivial empirical claims with genuine factual content and real-world implications. This paper provides the missing argument. I argue that by virtue of their material properties, technological artifacts are part of the normative order rather than external to it. I illustrate how values can be empirically identified in technology. The reason why value-talk is not trivial or metaphorical is that due to the endurance and longevity of technological artifacts, values embedded in them have long-term implications that surpass their designers and builders. I further argue that taking sides in this debate has real-world implications in the form of moral constraints on the development of technology. (shrink)

Many things can be other than they are. Many other things cannot. But what are statements like these about? One answer to this question is that we are speaking of possible worlds: if something can be other than it is, then it actually is that way in some possible world. If something cannot be otherwise, it is not otherwise in any world. This answer is presently dominant in analytical philosophy of language and logic. What are these worlds? David Lewis famously (...) claimed that every world exists, just like ours does: there is no difference between the other worlds and ours. In contrast, the medieval thinker John Buridan understands modal logic in terms of objects and causal powers in this world: if something can be other than it is, then there is a causal power that can make it that way. If it cannot, then no causal power—not even God—can alter it, at least without destroying its nature. As we’ll see, the Lewisian plurality is not possible on Buridan’s account; accordingly, a basic tenet of classical theism is untenable on Lewis’s metaphysics. In short, either the Lewisian plurality is incoherent, or a core monotheistic tenet is impossible. (shrink)

Mainstream analytic epistemology regards knowledge as the property of individuals, rather ‎than groups. Drawing on insights from the reality of knowledge production and dissemination ‎in the sciences, I argue, from within the analytic framework, that this view is wrong. I defend ‎the thesis of ‘knowledge-level justification communalism’, which states that at least some ‎knowledge, typically knowledge obtained from expert testimony, is the property of a ‎community and possibly none of its individual members, in that only the community or some ‎members (...) of it collectively possesses knowledge-level justification for its individual members’ ‎beliefs. I address several objections that individuals, qua individuals, have or are able to ‎acquire knowledge-level justification for all the beliefs they obtain from expert testimony. I ‎argue that the problem I identify with individualism is invariant under any specific account of ‎justification, internalist or externalist. ‎. (shrink)

Scholastic philosophers can be quite funny. What’s more, they have good reason to be: Aristotle himself lists ready wit (eutrapelia) among the virtues, as a mean between excessive humor and its defect. Here, I assess Scholastic discussions of humor in theory, before turning to examples of it in practice. The last and finest of these is a joke, hitherto unacknowledged, which Aquinas makes in his famous Five Ways. Along the way, we’ll see (i) that the history of philosophy is not (...) so hostile to humor as is commonly supposed; and (ii) that the competing theories of humor like the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory are not altogether incompatible. We’ll also see at least one example of an apparent attempt by modern translators to excise humor from a medieval text. Our considerations will open a window into what oral discussion and debate at medieval universities was actually like, and how we should understand the relationship between the texts we have now and the exchanges that actually occurred then. (shrink)

Information providing and gathering increasingly involve technologies like search ‎engines, which actively shape their epistemic surroundings. Yet, a satisfying account ‎of the epistemic responsibilities associated with them does not exist. We analyze ‎automatically generated search suggestions from the perspective of social ‎epistemology to illustrate how epistemic responsibilities associated with a ‎technology can be derived and assigned. Drawing on our previously developed ‎theoretical framework that connects responsible epistemic behavior to ‎practicability, we address two questions: first, given the different technological ‎possibilities available (...) to searchers, the search technology, and search providers, ‎who should bear which responsibilities? Second, given the technology’s ‎epistemically relevant features and potential harms, how should search terms be ‎autocompleted? Our analysis reveals that epistemic responsibility lies mostly with ‎search providers, which should eliminate three categories of autosuggestions: those ‎that result from organized attacks, those that perpetuate damaging stereotypes, and ‎those that associate negative characteristics with specific individuals.‎. (shrink)

Normatively inappropriate scientific dissent prevents warranted closure of scientific controversies and confuses the public about the state of policy-relevant science, such as anthropogenic climate change. Against recent criticism by de Melo-Martín and Intemann of the viability of any conception of normatively inappropriate dissent, I identify three conditions for normatively inappropriate dissent: its generation process is politically illegitimate, it imposes an unjust distribution of inductive risks, and it adopts evidential thresholds outside an accepted range. I supplement these conditions with an inference-to-the-best-explanation (...) account of knowledge-based consensus and dissent to allow policy makers to reliably identify unreliable scientific dissent. (shrink)

A consensus in a scientific community is often used as a resource for making informed public-policy decisions and deciding between rival expert testimonies in legal trials. This paper contains a social-epistemic analysis of the high-profile Bendectin drug controversy, which was decided in the courtroom inter alia by deference to a scientific consensus about the safety of Bendectin. Drawing on my previously developed account of knowledge-based consensus, I argue that the consensus in this case was not knowledge based, hence courts’ deference (...) to it was not epistemically justified. I draw sceptical lessons from this analysis regarding the value of scientific consensus as a desirable and reliable means of resolving scientific controversies in public life. (shrink)

Spoken sentences have parts. Therefore they take time to speak. For instance, when you say, “Socrates is running”, you begin by uttering the subject term ("Socrates"), before carrying on to the predicate. But are the corresponding predications in thought also composite? And are such thoughts extended across time, like their spoken counterparts? Peter Abelard gave an affirmative response to both questions. Alberic of Paris denied the first and, as a corollary, denied the second. Here, I first set out Abelard’s account. (...) I then present a series of arguments against Abelard, reconstructed from (sometimes fragmentary) manuscripts associated with Alberic’s school. I conclude with an observation about present philosophy of language: this twelfth-century debate points to some undefended (and largely unstated) assumptions common to our latest thinking about propositions. I highlight this by presenting recent accounts of two philosophers with radically different outlooks: Jeffrey King and Peter Hanks. Both their accounts take many of the same things for granted, as the Alberican criticisms make plain. (shrink)

If an argument is valid, it is impossible for its premises to be true, and its conclusion false. But how should we understand these notions of truth and impossibility? Here, I present the answers given by John Buridan (ca. 1300-60), showing (i) how he understands truth in his anti-realist metaphysics, and (ii) how he understands modality in connection with causal powers. In short: if an argument exists and is valid, there does not exist a power capable of making the premises (...) true and, at the same time, making the conclusion false. (shrink)

Social inequality may obstruct the generation of knowledge, as the rich and powerful may bring about social acceptance of skewed views that suit their interests. Epistemic equality in the context of justification is a means of preventing such obstruction. Drawing on social epistemology and theories of equality and distributive justice, we provide an account of epistemic equality. We regard participation in, and influence over a knowledge-generating discourse in an epistemic community as a limited good that needs to be justly distributed (...) among putative members of the community. We argue that rather than trying to operationally formulate an exact criterion for distributing this good, epistemic equality may be realized by insisting on active participation of members of three groups in addition to credited experts: relevant disempowered groups, relevant uncredited experts, and relevant stakeholders. Meeting these conditions fulfills the political, moral, and epistemic aims of epistemic equality. (shrink)

According to Ian Hacking’s Entity Realism, unobservable entities that scientists carefully manipulate to study other phenomena are real. Although Hacking presents his case in an intuitive, attractive, and persuasive way, his argument remains elusive. I present five possible readings of Hacking’s argument: a no-miracle argument, an indispensability argument, a transcendental argument, a Vichian argument, and a non-argument. I elucidate Hacking’s argument according to each reading, and review their strengths, their weaknesses, and their compatibility with each other.

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...) governed by a dedicated norm and motivated to a large extent by social identity maintenance. But confusion about this norm and its lack of inherent epistemic checks lead readers to misunderstand posts, attribute excess or insufficient credibility to posts, and allow posters to evade epistemic accountability—all contributing to the spread of epistemically toxic content online. This spread can be effectively addressed if people and platforms add significantly more context to shared posts and platforms nudge people to develop and follow recognized epistemic norms of posting and sharing. (shrink)

Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki are two of the most prominent Canadian public ‎intellectuals ‎involved in the global warming debate. They both argue that anthropogenic global ‎warming is ‎occurring, warn against its grave consequences, and urge governments and the ‎public to take ‎immediate, decisive, extensive, and profound measures to prevent it. They differ, ‎however, in the ‎reasons and evidence they provide in support of their position. While Suzuki ‎stresses the scientific ‎evidence in favour of the global warming theory and the (...) scientific ‎consensus around it, Atwood is ‎suspicious of the objectivity of science, and draws on an ‎idiosyncratic neo-Malthusian theory of ‎human development. Their implicit views ‎about the cognitive authority of science may be ‎identified with Critical Contextual Empiricism ‎and Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, respectively, ‎both of which face difficulties with ‎providing solid grounds for the position they advocate.‎ ‎. (shrink)

Multiple generality has long been known to cause confusion. For example, “Everyone has a donkey that is running” has two readings: either (i) there is a donkey, owned by everyone, and it is running; or (ii) everyone owns some donkey or other, and all such donkeys run. Medieval logicians were acutely aware of such ambiguities, and the logical problems they pose, and sought to sort them out. One of the most ambitious undertakings in this regard is a pair of massive (...) diagrams (magnae figurae) which map out the logical interrelations of two sets of doubly-general forms. These appear in a fourteenth-century MS of John Buridan’s Summulae de Propositionibus. In this paper, I present these diagrams, and determine the truth conditions of their different forms. To that end, I have developed a bespoke system of diagrams to display their truth conditions. As we will see, such forms present significant difficulties for an all-encompassing account of the role form plays in logic. Accordingly, they can tell us important things about the role logical form plays in Buridan’s account of logical foundations. (shrink)

There is an existing debate regarding the view that technological instruments, devices, or machines can assert ‎or testify. A standard view in epistemology is that only humans can testify. However, the notion of quasi-‎testimony acknowledges that technological devices can assert or testify under some conditions, without ‎denying that humans and machines are not the same. Indeed, there are four relevant differences between ‎humans and instruments. First, unlike humans, machine assertion is not imaginative or playful. Second, ‎machine assertion is prescripted and (...) context restricted. As such, computers currently cannot easily switch ‎contexts or make meaningful relevant assertions in contexts for which they were not programmed. Third, ‎while both humans and computers make errors, they do so in different ways. Computers are very sensitive to ‎small errors in input, which may cause them to make big errors in output. Moreover, automatic error control ‎is based on finding irregularities in data without trying to establish whether they make sense. Fourth, ‎testimony is produced by a human with moral worth, while quasi-testimony is not. Ultimately, the notion of ‎quasi-testimony can serve as a bridge between different philosophical fields that deal with instruments and ‎testimony as sources of knowledge, allowing them to converse and agree on a shared description of reality, ‎while maintaining their distinct conceptions and ontological commitments about knowledge, humans, and ‎nonhumans.‎. (shrink)

In the major French and German etymological dictionaries of Latin, there is some puzzlement over the semantics of exāmen: how can one word refer to a measurement or examination, but also to a swarm of bees? Walde and Hofmann suggest these two dis-parate meanings stem from the diverse meanings of the verb exigō (<*ex-agō, ‘to drive out’), from which exāmen derives. They claim these two senses of exāmen become two words in the Latin Sprachgefühl. Ernout and Meillet agree: there is (...) more than one exāmen in the Latins’ sentiment linguistique. I, too, agree. But this approach does not tell us why these terms derive from exigō, nor does it give any hint of an underlying concept which measurements and swarms of bees share, which makes a derivation from exigō appropriate to both. The present paper addresses this puzzle by reducing the two meanings of exāmen to one meaning of the parent term *ex-agō: ‘to drive out.’ In sum: a swarm of bees is a ‘driving out’ or outpouring, and a measurement or examination is a ‘driving out’ or setting out for scrutiny. This interpretation is moreover supported by semantically parallel uses of cognate terms in other Indo-European languages, notably Greek and Old Irish, and by semantic parallels in English and in the Slavic language family. Along the way, I touch upon a philosophical puzzle: at what point do evolving linguistic items with a common source become distinct from one another? (shrink)

What does success in online teaching look like? There are two ways to answer this question. The first defines success in terms of replacement of educational means: for example, how closely does an online lecture approximate its offline counterpart? The second defines success in terms of educational goals: for example, how well does an online lecture facilitate learning, compared with its offline counterpart? The first is a trap: it commits us to an endless online game of catch-up with offline models (...) of teaching. Instead, we should adopt a goal-oriented approach, mindful of obstacles to online teaching. As a case study, I present practices developed using this approach to teach philosophy online in 2020. An important upshot is that this approach leaves us open to ways in which online teaching is actually better than its offline counterpart. I conclude with some examples of these, and discuss their future implementation. (shrink)

According to Popper's rationality principle, agents act in the most adequate way according to the objective situation. I propose a new interpretation of the rationality principle as consisting of an idealization and two abstractions. Based on this new interpretation, I critically discuss the privileged status that Popper ascribes to it as an integral part of all social scientific models. I argue that as an idealization, the rationality principle may play an important role in the social sciences, but it also has (...) inherent limitations that inhibit it from having the privileged status that Popper ascribes to it in all cases. (shrink)

In August 2002, three Indian computer scientists published a paper, ‘PRIMES is in P’, online. It presents a ‘deterministic algorithm’ which determines in ‘polynomial time’ if a given number is a prime number. The story was quickly picked up by the general press, and by this means spread through the scientific community of complexity theorists, where it was hailed as a major theoretical breakthrough. This is although scientists regarded the media reports as vulgar popularizations. When the paper was published in (...) a peer-reviewed journal only two years later, the three scientists had already received wide recognition for their accomplishment. Current sociological theory challenges the ability to clearly distinguish on independent epistemic grounds between distorted and non-distorted scientific knowledge. It views the demarcation lines between such forms of presentation as contextual and unstable. In my paper, I challenge this view. By systematically surveying the popular press coverage of the ‘PRIMES is in P’ affair, I argue--against the prevailing new orthodoxy--that distorted simplifications of scientific knowledge are distinguishable from non-distorted simplifications on independent epistemic grounds. I argue that in the ‘PRIMES is in P’ affair, the three scientists could ride on the wave of the general press-distorted coverage of their algorithm, while counting on their colleagues’ ability to distinguish genuine accounts from distorted ones. Thus, their scientific reputation was unharmed. This suggests that the possibility of the existence of independent epistemic standards must be incorporated into the new SSK model of popularization. (shrink)

David Chalmers thinks his iPhone exemplifies the extended mind thesis by meeting the criteria ‎that he and Andy Clark established in their well-known 1998 paper. Andy Clark agrees. We take ‎this proposal seriously, evaluating the case of the GPS-enabled smartphone as a potential mind ‎extender. We argue that the “trust and glue” criteria enumerated by Clark and Chalmers are ‎incompatible with both the epistemic responsibilities that accompany everyday activities and the ‎practices of trust that enable users to discharge them. Prospects (...) for revision of the original ‎criteria are dim. We therefore call for a rejection of the trust criterion and a reevaluation of the ‎extended mind thesis.‎. (shrink)

Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for the Norm Effect: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. According to the former, the Norm Effect arises because ordinary causal judgment is intimately intertwined with moral responsibility. According to the alternative view, the Norm Effect is the result of a (...) blame-driven bias. In a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2688), we present evidence that predominantly favours the Bias View. In particular, and against predictions made by the Responsibility View, we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms – norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand – as more causal, and that this effect cannot be explained in terms of plausible mediators such as the agent’s foreknowledge and desire, or the foreseeability of harm. We close with a discussion regarding the implications of these findings, in as regards the just assessment of proximate cause in the law. (shrink)

What makes a valid argument valid? Generally speaking, in a valid argument, if the premisses are true, then the conclusion must necessarily also be true. But on its own, this doesn’t tell us all that much. What is truth? And what is necessity? In what follows, I consider answers to these questions proposed by the fourteenth century logician John Buridan († ca. 1358). My central claim is that Buridan’s logic is downstream from his metaphysics. Accordingly, I treat his metaphysical discussions (...) as the key to his logic. As has been often noted, Buridan’s metaphysics are radically anti-realist about universals, though I think the depth and scope of his anti-realism has at times been papered over. Buridan constructs his logic on an amazingly spartan ontology, and this accomplishment is overdue for reconsideration. To the foregoing questions: truth is a feature of propositions, and of propositions only—not of proposition-like states of affairs, or anything like that. It is a function of the reference or supposition (suppositio) of their terms, which depends on predication in a propositional context. And necessary truth is grounded in causation: a predication is necessary if it cannot be falsified by any power, natural or supernatural, without ii annihilating what its terms stand for. “Socrates is a human”, for instance, can only be falsified by annihilating Socrates, and so it is a necessary truth. -/- These considerations provide an ample theoretical basis for a thorough examination of Buridan’s modal logic. This is what the thesis culminates with. In the final chapter, I set forth some novel and surprising findings, chief of which is this: Buridan’s modal syntax and semantics are nothing like Kripke’s—and indeed are incompatible with them. This has significant implications not only for modal logic and metaphysics, but for how we think about medieval logic and philosophy more generally. -/- Throughout the thesis, I advocate a methodology of emphasising the differences, rather than the similarities, between past and present thought. Buridan is wildly unlike what we’re used to, and we should let him speak for himself. (shrink)

A growing body of literature has revealed ordinary causal judgement to be sensitive to normative factors, such that a norm-violating agent is regarded more causal than their non-norm-violating counterpart. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for this phenomenon: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. The Bias View, but not the Responsibility View, predicts features peripheral to the agent’s responsibility to impact causal attributions. In a series of three preregistered experiments (N = 1162), we present new evidence that (...) the Norm Effect arises from such peripheral features, namely from nonpertinent or entirely silly norm violations. Furthermore, we show that this effect cannot be explained by recourse to the agent’s foreknowledge or desire of the outcome, nor by its foreseeability: the Norm Effect arises even when participants judge the norm-violating agent’s doing as equally foreseeable. This, we argue, provides evidence in favour of the Bias View. (shrink)

Leading prescriptions for addressing the spread of fake news, misinformation, and other forms of epistemically toxic content online target either the platform or platform users as a single site for intervention. Neither approach attends to the intense feedback between people, posts, and platforms. Leading prescriptions boil down to the suggestion that we make social media more like traditional media, whether by making platforms take active roles as gatekeepers, or by exhorting individuals to behave more like media professionals. Both approaches are (...) impracticable and wrong. (shrink)

Sentences \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) are _cognitive synonyms_ for one when they play the same role in one’s cognitive life. The notion is pervasive (Sect. 1 ), but elusive: it is bound to be hyperintensional (Sect. 2 ), but excessive fine-graining would trivialize it and there are reasons for some coarse-graining (Sect. 2.1 ). Conceptual limitations stand in the way of a natural algebra (Sect. 2.2 ), and it should be sensitive to subject matters (Sect. 2.3 ). A cognitively adequate individuation (...) of content may be intransitive (Sect. 3 ) due to ‘dead parrot’ series: sequences of sentences \(\varphi _1, \ldots, \varphi _n\) where adjacent \(\varphi _i\) and \(\varphi _{i+1}\) are cognitive synonyms while \(\varphi _1\) and \(\varphi _n\) are not (Sect. 3.1 ). Finding an intransitive account is hard: Fregean equipollence won’t do (Sect. 3.2 ) and a result by Leitgeb shows that it wouldn’t satisfy a minimal compositionality principle (Sect. 3.3 )._Sed contra_, there are reasons for transitivity, too (Sect. 3.4 ). In Sect. 4, we come up with a formal semantics capturing this jumble of desiderata, thereby showing that the notion is coherent. In Sect. 5, we re-assess the desiderata in its light. (shrink)

When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents, (1) truth-conditions, and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth- conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.

In this paper I respond to Mathias Risse's objections to my critique of his views on racial profiling in Philosophy and Public Affairs. I draw on the work of Richard Sampson and others on racial disadvantage in the USA to show that racial profiling likely aggravates racial injustices that are already there. However, I maintain, clarify and defend my original claim against Risse that racial profiling itself is likely to cause racial injustice, even if we abstract from unfair background conditions. (...) I then respond to Levin's claims that there is no serious racial injustice in the contemporary USA and differentiate between Risse's attempt - albeit unsuccessful - to provide an egalitarian justification for racial profiling from the frankly inegalitarian assumptions that underpin the claims of Michael Levin. (shrink)

This article reintroduces Fr. Zeferino González, OP (1831-1894) to scholars of Church history, philosophy, and cultural heritage. He was an alumnus of the University of Santo Tomás in Manila, a Cardinal, and a champion of the revival of Catholic Philosophy that led to the promulgation of Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris. Specifically, this essay presents, firstly, the Cardinal’s biography in the context of his experience as a missionary in the Far East; secondly, the intellectual tradition in Santo Tomás in Manila, (...) which he carried with him until his death; and lastly, some reasons for his once-radiant memory to slip into an undeserved forgetfulness. (shrink)

Rapid technological advancements such as fMRI have led to the rise of neuroscientific discoveries. Coupled with findings from cognitive psychology, they are claiming to have solved the millennia-old puzzle of moral cognition. If true, our societal structures – and with that the criminal law – would be gravely impacted. This thesis concerns itself with four distinct theories stemming from the disciplines above as to what mechanisms constitute moral judgement: the Stage Model by KOHLBERG, the Universal Moral Grammar Theory by MIKHAIL, (...) the Social Intuitionist Model by HAIDT, and the Dual-Process Theory by GREENE – comparing the findings of the latter to the consequentialist and retributivist theories of punishment present in the American Criminal Law Doctrine. Analysing both a direct (link to deontology) and indirect (link to incompatibilism) approach to discrediting retributivism, I come to the conclusion that while science can have an impact on our morals and thus on the law, the current state of neuroscientific findings are not capable of shattering foundational notions of the criminal law. (shrink)

The choice of this topic is a curious one, perhaps, for art seems to be such a personal creation that even its appreciation may be relative and most of the time considered as subjective or reliant on impressions. Whether this idea is rightfully founded or not is reviewed in this paper: Is art’s meaning simply an impression? Does it come to exist merely because of whims and ecstasies? Is the experience of art such that it cannot but be dominated by (...) personal ideas? In answering these questions, I present a synthesis of some of the works of Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), a Thomist who has important insights concerning aesthetic experience. -/- Since the experience of art starts from its causes to the work’s appreciation by other people, the progression of this discussion is presented as follows: first, the concept of inspiration, to which artists usually attribute their creations, is assessed; then the aesthetic experience is reviewed to understand art’s qualities; and finally, the purpose and meaning of the artwork are examined. (shrink)

According to the most prominent principle of early modern rationalists, the Principle of Sufficient Reason [PSR], there are no brute facts, hence, there are no facts without any explanation. Contrary to the PSR, some philosophers have argued that divine ideas are brute facts within Leibniz’s metaphysics. In this paper, I argue against brute-fact-theories of divine ideas, especially represented by Samuel Newlands in Leibniz and the Ground of Possibility, and elaborate an alternative Leibnizian theory of divine ideas.

24 undergraduates were blindfolded and walked through paths laid out on a floor to investigate whether the orientation of Ss' cognitive maps (CMs) could be determined after they had learned a path by walking through it. Given the assumption that the CM is picturelike, it was predicted that it has a specific orientation, which implies that tests in which the CM is assumed to be aligned with the path should be less difficult than tests in which the CM is hypothesized (...) to be contraligned. In Exp I (8 Ss), Ss were required to draw a picture of the path they had walked through; in Exp II (14 Ss), Ss were required to locate targets in the path under conditions in which their presumed CMs were either aligned or contraligned with the path. Results show that, in Exp I, all Ss drew the 1st line segment of the path upward, suggesting that this part of the path was fixed in an upward direction in memory. In Exp II, Ss were more accurate and faster in locating points on the path when the CM was hypothesized to be aligned with the path than when it was hypothesized to be contraligned. (shrink)

In this essay we argue for the Janus-faced nature of hope. We show that attempts to sanitise the concept of hope either by separating it conceptually from other phenomena such as wishful thinking, or, more generally, by seeking to minimise the negative aspects of hope, do not help us to understand the nature of hope and its functions as regards religion. Drawing on functional accounts of religion from Clifford Geertz and Tamas Pataki, who both—in their different ways—see the function of (...) religion in terms of its capacity to satisfy deep psychological needs, we demonstrate that religion uniquely positions itself with regard to hope’s two faces, simultaneously exploiting positive and negative aspects of hope. (shrink)

Respect for victims requires that we have social systems for punishing and condemning (reproving) serious crimes. But, the conditions of social marginalization and political subordination of the communities from which an overwhelming number of prisoners in the United States come place serious barriers in the face of effective reprobation. Mass incarceration makes this problem worse by disrupting and disrespecting entire communities. While humanities education in the prisons is far from a total solution, it is one way to make reprobation meaningful, (...) so long as the prison classroom is a place where the educators’ values are also put at risk. (shrink)

It is argued that a chief obstacle to a naturalistic explanation of the origins of mind is human exceptionalism, as exemplified in the 17th century by Descartes, and in the 20th century by Noam Chomsky. As an antidote to human exceptionalism we turn to the account of aesthetic judgment in Darwin’s Descent of Man, according to which the mental capacities of humans differ from those of lower animals only in degree, not in kind. Thoroughgoing naturalistic explanation of these capacities is (...) made easier by shifting away from the substance-metaphysical implications of the search for an account of mind, toward a dispositional account of the origins of mindfulness. (shrink)

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge ‎generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and ‎algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is ‎provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation ‎in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for ‎journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining ‎knowledge, and a strong (...) orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition ‎and truth-seeking. This paper articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of ‎knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-‎mediated knowledge. ‎. (shrink)

Argument that Lewis and others are wrong that physicalism is if true then contingently true.

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The (...) Ethics of our Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)