Many philosophers and scientists have claimed that time has an arrow that points in a special direction. The Roman poet Ovid may have referred to this one-way property of time when he said, “Time itself glides on with constant motion, ever as a flowing river.” However, understanding this arrow is not … Continue reading The Arrow of Time →.

According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent's desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticised both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent's attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent of her utility and probability functions. The main (...) problem with that approach is that it suggests that attitudes to risk are wholly distinct from people's (non-instrumental) desires. To overcome this problem, we develop a framework where an agent's utility function is defined over chance propositions (i.e., propositions describing objective probability distributions) as well as ordinary (non-chance) ones, and argue that one should explain different risk attitudes in terms of different forms of the utility function over such propositions. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...) end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

Considerations of dynamic inconsistency have figured prominently in debates over the rationality of preferences that violate the separability conditions characteristic of expected utility theory. These debates have mostly focused on risk- and ambiguity averse preferences, but analogous considerations apply to preferences for fairness. We revisit these debates in the context of a specific hypothesis regarding the violations of separability by such preferences, namely that they are potentially both explained and rationalised by attitudes to the chances of goods that motivate a (...) preference for equality in the distribution of chances across people and possible events. Our main aim is to argue that, first, when these violations of static separability are motivated by such attitudes to chances, then they need not result in dynamically inconsistent behaviour. Second, and more generally, considerations of dynamic consistency do not, we argue, undermine the rationality of such attitudes towards the distribution of chances, despite the fact that such attitudes give rise to violations of the static separability assumptions of expected utility theory. (shrink)

According to a common judgement, a social planner should often use a lottery to decide which of two people should receive a good. This judgement undermines one of the best-known arguments for utilitarianism, due to John C. Harsanyi, and more generally undermines axiomatic arguments for utilitarianism and similar views. In this paper we ask which combinations of views about (a) the social planner’s attitude to risk and inequality, and (b) the subjects’ attitudes to risk are consistent with the aforementioned judgement. (...) We find that the class of combinations of views that can plausibly accommodate this judgement is quite limited. But one theory does better than others: the theory of chance-sensitive utility. (shrink)

Adam Elga takes the Sleeping Beauty example to provide a counter-example to Reflection, since on Sunday Beauty assigns probability 1/2 to H, and she is certain that on Monday she will assign probability 1/3. I will show that there is a natural way for Bas van Fraassen to defend Reflection in the case of Sleeping Beauty, building on van Fraassen’s treatment of forgetting. This will allow me to identify a lacuna in Elga’s argument for 1/3. I will then argue, however, (...) that not all is well with Reflection: there is a problem with van Fraassen’s treatment of forgetting. Ultimately I will agree with Elga’s 1/3 answer. David Lewis maintains that the answer is 1/2; I will argue that cases of forgetting can be used to show that the premiss of Lewis’s argument for 1/2 is false. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley’s relation regress poses a difficult problem for metaphysics of relations. In this paper, we reconstruct this regress argument systematically and make its presuppositions explicit in order to see where the possibility of its solution or resolution lies. We show that it cannot be answered by claiming that it is not vicious. Neither is one of the most promising resolutions, the relata-specific answer adequate in its present form. It attempts to explain adherence (relating), which is a crucial (...) component of the explanandum of Bradley’s relation regress, in terms of specific adherence of a relational trope to its relata. Nevertheless, since we do not know the consequences and constituents of a trope adhering to its specific relata, it remains unclear what specific adherence is. It is left as a constitutively inexplicable primitive. The relata-specific answer only asserts against Bradley. This negative conclusion highlights the need for a metaphysical account of the constitution of the holding of adherence. (shrink)

I agree that Wollheim is wrong in his reconstruction of Bradley's arguments on Subject-Predicate judgements, but not completely. Wollheim is right about the conclusion of Bradley's arguments. I argue that Bradley does not reject subject-predicate form of judgements rather he attack's the idea that there is some judgement in which the subject is the nude reality.

In his recent The Parmenidean Ascent, Michael Della Rocca develops a regress-theoretic case, reminiscent of F.H. Bradley’s famous argument in Appearance and Reality, against the intelligibility of relations and in favor of a monistic conception of reality. I argue that Della Rocca illicitly supposes that “internal” relations – in one sense of that word – lead to a “chain” regress, a regress of relations relating relations and relata. In contrast, I contend that if “internal” or grounded relations lead to (...) a regress at all, it is a kind of “fission” regress within the relata themselves, and that a chain regress for relations only arises, if at all, for so-called “external” relations, relations not grounded in their relata. In this way, I contend that Della Rocca pursues a regress for so-called “internal” or grounded relations that only arises, if at all, for so-called “external” relations, relations not grounded in their relata. I compare Della Rocca’s case against relations with Bradley’s reasoning in Appearance and Reality, and suggest in this context that Bradley may, perhaps, have the upper hand. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine the infinite regress arguments pertaining to the unreality of relations that are presented in Francis Herbert Bradley’s paper, Appearance and Reality. Then I will suggest two argumentative strategies one can take to undermine Bradley’s regress argument. The first option concerns plainly rejecting the regress by stating that Bradley is viewing relations as kinds of objects that are in need of being related, whereas the second option is in regards to adopting an (...) existential-dependence view between objects and their properties to refute the need for relations. I will conclude this paper by comparing these two strategies against each other, alluding to each of their ramifications. (shrink)

According to Stewart Candlish, Russell and Moore had misunderstood F. H. Bradley’s monism. According to Jonathan Schaffer, they had misunderstood monism more generally. A key thread of the creation narrative of analytic philosophy, according to which Russell and Moore successfully undermined monism to give rise to a new movement is, therefore, in doubt. In this paper, I defend the standard narrative against those who seek to revise it.

La thèse du présent article est que l’opposition factice entre James, repré- sentant supposé des « relations externes », d’une part, et Bradley, représen- tant supposé des « relations internes », d’autre part, est due à une mauvaise appréhension des thèses de ce dernier. Ce premier contresens conduit alors à manquer le propos même de James.

I argue that the Bradley of the 1883 The Principles of Logic marks and separates contents under tension in judgments. The separation comes in attending to content as a device for recuperation of scale. For Bradley that involves scaling material of immediate presentations under limits. As unrealised commitments of so- called real and ideal are an exclusionary condition of singular comprehension, singularity of judgments is mark of singular reflex with privative force; not some singularity in objects taken in (...) episodic correspondence forming distinctively in singular judgment. The distinguishing input, as it were, to judgment forms is via content in some consequential and fact-like limitive facing of the real. I want to approach Bradley in this slightly negative sense as imposing via inversion some sensible restrictions under some conditions of scaling rather than in direct contact with materials to which one stands in some act of obversion, finally. (shrink)

Two concepts of utmost importance for the analytic philosophy of the twentieth century, “sense-data” and “knowledge by acquaintance”, were introduced by Bertrand Russell under the influence of two idealist philosophers: F. H. Bradley and Alexius Meinong. This paper traces the exact history of their introduction. We shall see that between 1896 and 1898, Russell had a fully-elaborated theory of “sense-data”, which he abandoned after his analytic turn of the summer of 1898. Furthermore, following a subsequent turn of August 1900—-after (...) he became acquainted with the works of Peano and later of Frege—-Russell gradually developed another theory of sense-data. With the collaboration of G. E. Moore, Russell reintroduced the term “sense-data” in 1911. Concomitantly with this move, Russell introduced the epistemological term “knowledge by acquaintance”, which came to designate the grasping of sense-data and universals. (shrink)

This paper draws together as many as possible of the clues and pieces of the puzzle surrounding T. S. Eliot’s “infamous” literary term “objective correlative”. Many different scholars have claimed many different sources for the term, in Pound, Whitman, Baudelaire, Washington Allston, Santayana, Husserl, Nietzsche, Newman, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Russell, Bradley, Bergson, Bosanquet, Schopenhauer and Arnold. This paper aims to rewrite this list by surveying those individuals who, in different ways, either offer the truest claim to being the source (...) of the term, or contributed the most to Eliot’s development of it: Allston, Husserl, Bradley and Bergson. What the paper will argue is that Eliot’s possible inspiration for the term is more indebted to the idealist tradition, and Bergson’s aesthetic development of it, than to the phenomenology of Husserl. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist (...) tradition and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

In this existential reading of Kim Kardashian-West's International Women's Day selfie of 2016, I focus on the rise of selfie culture and public discourse around emerging digital representations of women's bodies. The selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, and is particularly curious because of the subject/object paradox it creates; in taking a selfie, a person asserts control over their own image, but at the same time, becomes object in their own gaze. My argument is that selfies, like other assertions of (...) bodily subjectivity in digital spaces, are a threat to patriarchal structures that paint women as immanent, object, as reflected in public discourse around Kardashian-West's International Women's Day selfie. I draw on both Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's work on subjectivity in existentialism and phenomenology, as well as Amy Shields Dobson's work on post-feminism and young women's projections of self, in order to delineate what it is about the selfie that creates this paradox. I also make reference to the work of Elisabeth Grosz and Frantz Fanon in relation to a colonial hierarchy that prioritises body over mind, as well as Laura Mulvey's work on the male gaze. (shrink)

Non-Relational Realism is a popular solution to the Bradleyan regress of facts or truths. It denies that there is a relational universal of exemplification; for an object a to exemplify a universal F-ness, on this view, is not for a relation to subsist between a and F-ness. An influential objection to Non-Relational Realism is that it is unacceptably obscure. The author argues that Non-Relational Realism can be understood as a selective application of satisfaction semantics to predicates like ‘exemplify’, and that (...) so understood, it is not obscure. This kind of selective use of satisfaction semantics may be feasible in other contexts as a means of making theories more parsimonious. (shrink)

There is an inherent link between colonisation and carceral institutions, and in this paper I aim to illuminate and critically review the philosophical implications of prison structures in relation to coloniality. I draw on the work of Lewis Gordon, Frantz Fanon & Nelson Maldonado-Torres in arguing that physical incarceration not only colonises the body, but the mind too, as a form of structural violence. In order to establish an existential phenomenological framework for coloniality in incarceration, I also make reference to (...) Hannah Arendt. Her work on both totalitarianism and the banality of evil help to develop the framework, and I further utilise Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement in taking a phenomenological approach to thinking about incarceration. After this critical discussion of the coloniality of incarceration, I apply the framework to the New Zealand context, where Māori are hugely overrepresented in prisons. In invoking Sharon Shalev’s recent report into solitary confinement in Aotearoa, I argue that the disproportionate numbers of Māori in New Zealand prisons are symptomatic of the inherently colonial nature of carceral institutions, and also maintain that understanding the fundamentally colonial nature of prisons is key to ensuring the Crown and government fulfil certain obligations to Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi. (shrink)

Monism about being says that there is one way to be. Pluralism about being says that there are many ways to be. Recently, Trenton Merricks and David Builes have offered arguments against Pluralism. In this paper, I show how Pluralists who appeal to the relative naturalness of quantifiers can respond to these arguments.

I argue that the wave function ontology for quantum mechanics is an undesirable ontology. This ontology holds that the fundamental space in which entities evolve is not three-dimensional, but instead 3N-dimensional, where N is the number of particles standardly thought to exist in three-dimensional space. I show that the state of three-dimensional objects does not supervene on the state of objects in 3N-dimensional space. I also show that the only way to guarantee the existence of the appropriate mental states in (...) the wave function ontology has undesirable metaphysical baggage: either mind/body dualism is true, or circumstances which we take to be logically possible turn out to be logically impossible.“While our theory can be extended formally in a logically consistent way by introducing the concept of a wave in a 3N-dimensional space, it is evident that this procedure is not really acceptable in a physical theory... ” (Bohm 1957, 117). (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate and argue for a new truthmaker view of ontological commitment, which I call the “General Truthmaker View”: when one affirms a sentence, one is ontologically committed to there being something that makes true the proposition expressed by the sentence. This view comes apart from Quinean orthodoxy in that we are not ontologically committed to the things over which we quantify, and it comes apart from extant truthmaker views of ontological commitment in that we are not (...) ontologically committed to the truthmakers of our sentences. (shrink)

I argue that space has three dimensions, and quantum mechanics does not show otherwise. Specifically, I argue that the mathematical wave function of quantum mechanics corresponds to a property that an N-particle system has in three-dimensional space.

There is a growing movement towards construing some classic debates in ontology as meaningless, either because the answers seem obvious or the debates seem intractable. In this paper, I respond to this movement. The response has three components: First, the members of the two sides of the ontological debates that dismissivists have targeted are using different quantifiers. Second, the austere ontologist is using a more fundamental quantifier than her opponent. Third, the austere ontologist’s more fundamental quantifier is a restriction of (...) her opponent’s quantifier. This response takes seriously the intuition that there is something wrong with the ontological disputes, but does not entail dismissivism. (shrink)

In reply to the problem of evil, some suggest that God created an infinite number of universes—for example, that God created every universe that contains more good than evil. I offer two objections to these multiverse theodicies. First, I argue that, for any number of universes God creates, he could have created more, because he could have created duplicates of universes. Next, I argue that multiverse theodicies can’t adequately account for why God would create universes with pointless suffering, and hence (...) they don’t solve the problem of evil. (shrink)

Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...) puzzles apply just as well to the old puzzles, the old puzzles provide no motivation to be a mereological nihilist. (shrink)

Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity-crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object-seeing without object-attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity-crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non-perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity-crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity-crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about (...) phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object-attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity-crowding likely involves an attention-like selective process. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of religion have turned their attention to the topic of faith. Given the ubiquity of the word “faith” both in and out of religious contexts, many of them have chosen to begin their forays by offering an analysis of faith. But it seems that there are many kinds of faith: religious faith, non‐religious faith, interpersonal faith, and propositional faith, to name a few. In this article, I discuss analyses of faith that have been offered and (...) point out the dimensions along which they differ. (shrink)

Ruetsche (1996) has argued that van Fraassen's (1991) Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation (CVMI) gives unsatisfactory accounts of measurement and of state preparation. I defend the CVMI against Ruetsche's first argument by using decoherence to show that the CVMI does not need to account for the measurement scenario which Ruetsche poses. I then show, however, that there is a problem concerning preparation, and the problem is more serious than the one Ruetsche focuses on. The CVMI makes no substantive predictions (...) for the everyday processes we take to be measurements. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new theory of grounding. The theory has it that grounding is a job description that is realized by different properties in different contexts. Those properties play the grounding role contingently, and grounding is the property that plays the grounding role essentially. On this theory, grounding is monistic, but ‘grounding’ refers to different relations in different contexts. First, I argue against Kit Fine’s monist univocalism. Next, I argue against Jessica Wilson’s pluralist multivocalism. Finally, I introduce (...) monist multivocalism, explicate three versions of it (of which the above is one), and show its advantages. (shrink)

The fundamental constants that are involved in the laws of physics which describe our universe are finely-tuned for life, in the sense that if some of the constants had slightly different values life could not exist. Some people hold that this provides evidence for the existence of God. I will present a probabilistic version of this fine-tuning argument which is stronger than all other versions in the literature. Nevertheless, I will show that one can have reasonable opinions such that the (...) fine-tuning argument doesn’t lead to an increase in one’s probability for the existence of God. (shrink)

There is a philosophical tradition of arguing against presentism, the thesis that only presently existing things exist, on the basis of its incompatibility with fundamental physics. I grant that presentism is incompatible with special and general relativity, but argue that presentism is not incompatible with quantum gravity, because there are some theories of quantum gravity that utilize a fixed foliation of spacetime. I reply to various objections to this defense of presentism, and point out a flaw in Gödel's modal argument (...) for the ideality of time. This paper provides an interesting case study of the interplay between physics and philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss some prominent features of our use of social media and what I think are its harms. My paper has three main parts. In the first part, I use a dialogical framework to argue that much of the discursive activity online is manifested as an ethically impoverished other-directedness and interactivity. In the second part, I identify and discuss several reasons that help explain why so much of the discursive activity on social media is ethically lacking. And (...) in the final part, I mention some of the effects these discursive practices have on us even when offline. Specifically, I suggest that the persistent use of digital communication technologies trains its users to adopt these problematic online discursive attitudes and activities into their experiences offline, making it more difficult for them to engage with themselves and others in more dialogically ethical ways. (shrink)

Nelson et al.(2023) argue that the inclusion of personal experience in bioethical debates has significant benefits and liabilities, illustrating their claim with two examples: unproven medical treatments and disability bioethics. We believe that the benefits of including personal experience in disability bioethics far exceed its liabilities. The absence of participants with relevant experience impoverishes and biases bioethical debates, while the biases risked by their inclusion are hardly unique to personal experiences and are readily mitigated.

I defend Pascal's Wager from a particular way of evading it, the mixed strategy approach. The mixed strategies approach suggests that Pascal's Wager does not obligate one to believe in God, because one can get the same infinite expected utility from other strategies besides the strategy of believing in God. I will show that while there's nothing technically wrong with the mixed strategy approach, rationality requires it to be applied in such a way that Pascal's Wager doesn't lose any force.

Dmitri Nikulin is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have devoted books to the topic of dialogue and the dialogical self, especially in the last fifteen years. Yet his work on dialogue and the dialogical has received scant attention by philosophers, and this neglect has hurt the ongoing development of contemporary philosophical work on dialogicality. I want to address this lacuna in contemporary philosophical scholarship on dialogicality and suggest that, although Nikulin’s account is no doubt insightful and thought-provoking, it (...) is problematic for two main reasons: first, his account fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; and second, his enumeration of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies. (shrink)

It has sometimes been suggested that backwards time travel always incurs causal loops. I show that this is mistaken, by describing worlds where backwards time travel occurs and yet no causal loops occur. Arguments that backwards time travel can occur without causal loops have been given before in the literature, but I show that those arguments are unconvincing.

In this paper, I show how a solution to Lewis’ problem of temporary intrinsics is also a response to McTaggart’s argument that the A-series is incoherent. There are three strategies Lewis considers for solving the problem of temporary intrinsics: perdurantism, presentism, and property-indexing. William Lane Craig (Analysis 58(2):122–127, 1998) has examined how the three strategies fare with respect to McTaggart’s argument. The only viable solution Lewis considers to the problem of temporary intrinsics that also succeeds against McTaggart, Craig claims, is (...) presentism. This gives us prima facie reason to be presentists. But there is a strategy Craig does not consider-indexing, or relativizing, the copula. In this paper, I show that to the degree that indexing the copula solves the problem of temporary intrinsics, it also shows the invalidity of McTaggart’s argument. The upshot: the copula-indexer needn’t affirm the unreality of time, nor need she embrace presentism. (shrink)

It is argued that, given certain reasonable premises, an infinite number of qualitatively identical but numerically distinct minds exist per functioning brain. The three main premises are (1) mental properties supervene on brain properties; (2) the universe is composed of particles with nonzero extension; and (3) each particle is composed of continuum-many point-sized bits of particle-stuff, and these points of particle-stuff persist through time.

Metaphysicians sometimes appeal to physics to establish claims about the fundamental nature of the world. But given the current state of inquiry in physics, where there are two most fundamental theories that are incompatible, such arguments of physics-based metaphysics are problematic. I support this line of thought by focussing on two sorts of problematic arguments, special-relativity-based arguments against presentism and big-bang-based arguments in favor of the existence of God. I am not arguing that physics-based metaphysics can’t be done; I am (...) just arguing that extant examples of physics-based metaphysics are flawed. I close by considering various ways that future versions of physics-based metaphysics could potentially be successful. (shrink)

The idea of self-measurement by a quantum-mechanical automaton is presented, and the conclusions that are typically reached about what we can come to know from doing self-measurements are shown to be mistaken. Specifically, it is shown that, while we are capable of _predicting_ and _measuring_ the values of two incompatible observables, we are incapable of _knowing_ both these values simultaneously. This is an example of the interesting limitations quantum mechanics places on knowledge.

The Carter-Leslie Doomsday argument, as standardly presented, relies on the assumption that you have knowledge of your approximate birth rank. I demonstrate that the Doomsday argument can still be given in a situation where you have no knowledge of your birth rank. This allows one to reply to Bostrom's defense of the Doomsday argument against the refutation based on the idea that your existence makes it more likely that many observers exist.

The physicist J. Richard Gott has given an argument which, if good, allows one to make accurate predictions for the future longevity of a process, based solely on its present age. We show that there are problems with some of the details of Gott's argument, but we defend the core thesis: in many circumstances, the greater the present age of a process, the more likely a longer future duration.

Both Philip and Andrew are philosophy students whose interests converge around the philosophy of technology broadly understood. Philip's interest is specifically aimed toward the ethics of Transhumanism and depictions of Transhumanism in works of fiction. On the other hand, Andrew finds himself more focused on religious behavior in the technological world. While the two perspectives might not seem that close, there is certain to be an overlap in Andrew and Philip's shared understanding of how technological phenomena play a crucial role (...) concerning religion and society. (shrink)

What if your peers tell you that you should disregard your perceptions? Worse, what if your peers tell you to disregard the testimony of your peers? How should we respond if we get evidence that seems to undermine our epistemic rules? Several philosophers have argued that some epistemic rules are indefeasible. I will argue that all epistemic rules are defeasible. The result is a kind of epistemic particularism, according to which there are no simple rules connecting descriptive and normative facts. (...) I will argue that this type of particularism is more plausible in epistemology than in ethics. The result is an unwieldy and possibly infinitely long epistemic rule — an Uber-rule. I will argue that the Uber-rule applies to all agents, but is still defeasible — one may get misleading evidence against it and rationally lower one’s credence in it. (shrink)

In his 1955 essay "Meaning and synonymy in natural languages", Rudolf Carnap presents a thought experiment wherein an investigator provides a hypothetical robot with a definition of a concept together with a description of an individual, and then asks the robot if the individual is in the extension of the concept. In this work, we show how to realize Carnap's Robot through knowledge probing of an large language model (LLM), and argue that this provides a useful cognitive tool for conceptual (...) engineers to compare the extension of a proposed concept definition to the extensional knowledge represented as facts in a given knowledge base, providing a possible solution to the implementation problem in conceptual engineering. (shrink)

I maintain that quantum mechanics is fundamentally about a system of N particles evolving in three-dimensional space, not the wave function evolving in 3N-dimensional space.

Peirce and Dewey were generally more concerned with the process of scientific activity than purely mathematical work. However, their accounts of knowledge production afford some insights into the epistemology of mathematical postulates, especially definition and axioms. Their rejection of rationalist metaphysics and their emphasis on continuity in inquiry provides the pretext for the pragmatic a priori – hypothetical and operational assumptions whose justification relies on their fruitfulness in the long run. This paper focuses on the application of this idea to (...) the epistemology of definitions and an account of progress in mathematics, although it has broader implications for the study of conceptual change and the function and basis of presuppositions in the sciences. (shrink)

Many epistemological problems can be solved by the objective Bayesian view that there are rationality constraints on priors, that is, inductive probabilities. But attempts to work out these constraints have run into such serious problems that many have rejected objective Bayesianism altogether. I argue that the epistemologist should borrow the metaphysician’s concept of naturalness and assign higher priors to more natural hypotheses.