The new inter-disciplinary eclecticism championed by many philosophers of science has generated a heterogeneous family of science studies projects. Philosophers who favor an inter-disciplinary approach face many problems if they are to successfully forge a hybrid science studies that does not violate their integrity as philosophers in particular, they must isolate an intellectual space in which traditional agendas, such as the concern for the clarification of concepts, can hold court. In this paper, I outline what I regard as a new (...) brand of HPS, one that is deeply rooted in the history of the exact science. The virtue of this New HPS, I will submit, is that it furnishes philosophers of science with a fresh perspective from which to carry on philosophy's classic normative mission. (shrink)

Two principal questions are addressed: In De Finibus 3.54 what position does Cicero imagine the talus to fall and lie? How does this talus simile shed light on the problematic relationship between the Stoics’ doctrine of ‘preferred indifferents’ and their definition of the Good as virtue?

Edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness held at the University of Cambridge in January 1978. Includes a foreword by Freeman Dyson. Chapter authors: G. Vesey, R.L. Gregory, H.C. Longuet-Higgins, N.K. Humphrey, H.B. Barlow, D.M. MacKay, B.D. Josephson, M. Roth, V.S. Ramachandran, S. Padfield, and (editorial summary only) E. Noakes. A scanned pdf is available from this web site (philpapers.org), while alternative versions more suitable for copying text are available from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245189. -/- Page numbering convention for the pdf version (...) viewed in a pdf viewer is as follows: 'go to page n' accesses the pair of scanned pages 2n and 2n+1. Applicable licence: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. (shrink)

In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes says, Finally, it is so manifest that we possess a free will, capable of giving or withholding its assent, that this truth must be reckoned among the first and most common notions which are born with us.

A recent paper by Tom Stern suggests that Socrates’s philosophical psychology, which emphasizes rational reflection, is superior to Nietzsche’s drive model when explaining human behavior. I argue that Stern’s analysis is wrong on three fronts. First, the models share common, though inverted, features. Second, Stern fails to consider the role of Socrates’s daimon when evaluating Socrates’s philosophy of mind; third, Nietzsche’s model is more warranted. In sum, Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology is a correction of the Socratic.

Comments on Eugenio Petrovich’s book _A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy: Looking Through the Margins_, for the Quantitative Studies of Philosophy workshop at Tilburg, August 21-22 2024.

Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based reason against (...) lying. The problem is a general one: the wrong of lying cannot be founded on the goods of language. (shrink)

In recent years, theorists have debated how we introduce new social objects and kinds into the world. Searle, for instance, proposes that they are introduced by collective acceptance of a constitutive rule; Millikan and Elder that they are the products of reproduction processes; Thomasson that they result from creator intentions and subsequent intentional reproduction; and so on. In this chapter, I argue against the idea that there is a single generic method or set of requirements for doing so. Instead, there (...) is a variety of what I call “anchoring schemas,” or methods by which new social kinds are generated. Not only are social kinds a diverse lot, but the metaphysical explanation for their being the kinds they are is diverse as well. I explain the idea of anchoring and present examples of social kinds that are similar to one another but that are anchored in different ways. I also respond to Millikan’s argument that there is only one kind of “glue” that is “sticky enough” for holding together kinds. I argue that no anchoring schema will work in all environments. It is a contingent matter which schemas are successful for anchoring new social kinds, and an anchoring schema need only be “sticky enough” for practical purposes in a given environment. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a difficulty for Fine's exact semantics for counterfactuals. The difficulty undermines Fine's reasons for preferring exact semantics to possible worlds semantics.

Gordon Belot has recently developed a novel argument against Bayesianism. He shows that there is an interesting class of problems that, intuitively, no rational belief forming method is likely to get right. But a Bayesian agent’s credence, before the problem starts, that she will get the problem right has to be 1. This is an implausible kind of immodesty on the part of Bayesians. My aim is to show that while this is a good argument against traditional, precise Bayesians, the (...) argument doesn’t neatly extend to imprecise Bayesians. As such, Belot’s argument is a reason to prefer imprecise Bayesianism to precise Bayesianism. (shrink)

When we ask a decision maker to express her preferences, it is typically assumed that we are eliciting a pre-existing set of preferences. However, empirical research has suggested that our preferences are often constructed on the fly for the decision problem at hand. This paper explores the ramifications of this empirical research for our understanding of instrumental rationality. First, I argue that these results pose serious challenges for the traditional decision-theoretic view of instrumental rationality, which demands global coherence amongst all (...) of one's beliefs and desires. To address these challenges, I first develop a minimal notion of instrumental rationality that issues in localized, goal-relative demands of coherence. This minimal conception of instrumental rationality is then used to offer a more sophisticated account of the global aspects of instrumental rationality. The resulting view abandons all-or-nothing assessments of rationality and allows us to evaluate decision makers as being rational to varying degrees. My aim is to propose a theory that is both psychologically and normatively plausible. (shrink)

Many writers have held that in his later work, David Lewis adopted a theory of predicate meaning such that the meaning of a predicate is the most natural property that is (mostly) consistent with the way the predicate is used. That orthodox interpretation is shared by both supporters and critics of Lewis's theory of meaning, but it has recently been strongly criticised by Wolfgang Schwarz. In this paper, I accept many of Schwarze's criticisms of the orthodox interpretation, and add some (...) more. But I also argue that the orthodox interpretation has a grain of truth in it, and seeing that helps us appreciate the strength of Lewis's late theory of meaning. (shrink)

I argue that what evidence an agent has does not supervene on how she currently is. Agents do not always have to infer what the past was like from how things currently seem; sometimes the facts about the past are retained pieces of evidence that can be the start of reasoning. The main argument is a variant on Frank Arntzenius’s Shangri La example, an example that is often used to motivate the thought that evidence does supervene on current features.

Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this (...) debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant’s relationship to Hume sketched above. (shrink)

Molyneux’s question, whether the newly sighted might immediately recognize tactilely familiar shapes by sight alone, has produced an array of answers over three centuries of debate and discussion. I propose the first pluralist response: many different answers, both yes and no, are individually sufficient as an answer to the question as a whole. I argue that this is possible if we take the question to be cluster concept of sub-problems. This response opposes traditional answers that isolate specific perceptual features as (...) uniquely applicable to Molyneux’s question and grant viability to only one reply. Answering Molyneux’s question as a cluster concept may also serve as a methodology for resolving other philosophical problems. (shrink)

Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate a (...) new scale—the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale—to dissociate individual differences in the ‘negative’ (permissive attitude toward instrumental harm) and ‘positive’ (impartial concern for the greater good) dimensions of utilitarian thinking as manifested in the general population. We show that these are two independent dimensions of proto-utilitarian tendencies in the lay population, each exhibiting a distinct psychological profile. Empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and although instrumental harm was associated with subclinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity. Importantly, although these two dimensions were independent in the lay population, they were closely associated in a sample of moral philosophers. Acknowledging this dissociation between the instrumental harm and impartial beneficence components of utilitarian thinking in ordinary people can clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology and its relation to moral philosophy as well as generate fruitful avenues for further research. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is modeled on the Wolffian division of logic textbooks into sections on concepts, judgments, and inferences. While it is undeniable that the Transcendental Logic contains elements that are similar to the content of these sections, I believe these similarities are largely incidental to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In this essay, I offer an alternative and, I believe, more plausible account of Wolff’s influence on the structure of the (...) Transcendental Logic, one that puts the focus on his empirical psychology rather than his logic. In particular, I argue that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is deeply indebted to a conception of purity that Wolff introduces in his empirical psychology and that this conception sheds more light on the overall structure of the Transcendental Logic than the accepted view. In section one, I outline two conceptions of purity found in Kant and trace them to similar views in Wolff. In section two, I turn to Kant’s views about logic as they are expressed in the Critique and argue that it is best to interpret Kant’s taxonomy of logic on its own terms rather than reading it through its terminological similarities to aspects of the Wolffian tradition. In section three, I argue that the second of the two conceptions of purity identified in section one is central to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In doing so, I argue against the widespread view that this section of the Critique is modeled solely on what Kant calls pure general logic as opposed to both pure and applied general logic. I then conclude by briefly reviewing my account and considering some of its broader implications for our understanding of Kant. (shrink)

How do people think about the mental states of robots? Experimental philosophers have developed various models aiming to specify the factors that drive people's attributions of mental states to robots. Here we report on a new experiment involving robots, the results of which tell against competing models. We advocate a view on which attributions of mental states to robots are driven by the same dual-process architecture that subserves attributions of mental states more generally. In support of this view, we leverage (...) recent psychological research on human-robot interaction that involve ecologically-valid stimuli such as Roombas and humanoid robots. (shrink)

Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation as such (...) a refutation, and (3) that none of Hume’s early German critics provided responses to this account that would have satisfied Kant. Watkins’ reading of Kant’s account of causation is thus more compatible with traditional views about Kant’s relationship to Hume than Watkins believes. (shrink)

The Protagoras is the touchstone of Socrates’ moral intellectualist stance. The position in a nutshell stipulates that the proper reevaluation of a desire is enough to neutralize it.[1] The implication of this position is that akrasia or weakness of will is not the result of desire (or fear for that matter) overpowering reason but is due to ignorance. -/- Socrates’ eliminativist position on weakness of will, however, flies in the face of the common-sense experience regarding akratic action and thus Aristotle (...) was at pains to render Socrates’ account of moral incontinence intelligible. The key improvement Aristotle makes to Socrates’s model is to underscore that the conditioning of the akratic’s body plays a critical role in determining the power of one’s appetites and, accordingly, the capacity of one to resist the temptations these appetites present for rational evaluation. As Aristotle puts it, “For the incontinent man is like the people who get drunk quickly and on little wine, i.e., on less than most people.” (1151a 3-4). Aristotle presents what I shall call a somatic paradigm (i.e. the drunkard analogy) in order to tackle the problem of akrasia and it is this somatic solution that marks a significant improvement over Socrates’s intellectualist or informational model or so the tradition tells us. -/- In this paper, I wish to push back on the above Aristotelian explanation. I argue that when one fully examines Socrates’ account of weakness of will that Aristotle’s solution is less effective than is traditionally thought. In fact, Socrates can bring Aristotle’s model into his own; just as Aristotle absorbs what is right about Socrates’s model, namely, that akratic action utilizes reason but to a limited degree, Socrates in Meno (77C-78A) develops his own somatic model of weakness of will that connects to the intellectualist paradigm of the Protagoras. To achieve this rapprochement between the two models, I zero in on the description provided by Socrates of those individuals who desire bad things knowing they are bad as “ill-starred” or “bad spirited” (κακοδαίμων ). The “bad-spirited” is the coward and, in contrast to Aristotle’s drunkard, becomes fearful quickly from little danger. This additional somatic component, when connected to Socrates’s position on akrasia in Protagoras adds a new twist to Socrates’s model in the following way: while no one wishes to be ill-starred such that more harm than good will befall one, one may become so as a result of the bad choices one knowingly makes. -/- -/- [1] “After him came Socrates, who spoke better and further about this subject, but even he was not successful. For he used to make the virtues into sciences, and this is impossible. For the sciences all involve reason, and reason is to be found in the intellectual part of the soul. So that all the virtues, according to him arise in the rational part of the soul. The result is that in making the virtues into sciences he is doing away with the nonrational part of the soul and is thereby doing away with passion and character…” (Aristotle, Magna Moralia 1.1. 1182 a15-26). (shrink)

Predictive algorithms are playing an increasingly prominent role in society, being used to predict recidivism, loan repayment, job performance, and so on. With this increasing influence has come an increasing concern with the ways in which they might be unfair or biased against individuals in virtue of their race, gender, or, more generally, their group membership. Many purported criteria of algorithmic fairness concern statistical relationships between the algorithm’s predictions and the actual outcomes, for instance requiring that the rate of false (...) positives be equal across the relevant groups. We might seek to ensure that algorithms satisfy all of these purported fairness criteria. But a series of impossibility results shows that this is impossible, unless base rates are equal across the relevant groups. What are we to make of these pessimistic results? I argue that none of the purported criteria, except for a calibration criterion, are necessary conditions for fairness, on the grounds that they can all be simultaneously violated by a manifestly fair and uniquely optimal predictive algorithm, even when base rates are equal. I conclude with some general reflections on algorithmic fairness. (shrink)

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. While such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to “medicalization” of human love and heartache—for some, a source of serious concern. In this essay, we argue that the “medicalization of love” need not necessarily be problematic, on balance, but could plausibly be expected to have either good (...) or bad consequences depending upon how it unfolds. By anticipating some of the specific ways in which these technologies could yield unwanted outcomes, bioethicists and others can help direct the course of love’s “medicalization”—should it happen to occur—more toward the “good” side than the “bad.”. (shrink)

It is often thought that the meaning of a legal provision must reside in the minds of its authors or its interpreters, or a combination of the two. Indeed, the point may seem so obvious that it scarcely needs any justification. Is there any sense, then, in the claim sometimes made by judges that a law has a meaning of its own, one that is distinct from the intentions of authors and interpreters alike? At first sight, the claim appears extravagant (...) and self-serving. However, there is more to it than meets the eye. Drawing on an example from the world of games, this essay argues that the law makes up a “participatory order of meaning,” an autonomous order to which legal drafters and interpreters bend their minds as they create particular patterns of meaning. Ultimately, a legal order should be understood as a concrete instance of a transcendent order of justice and basic values, which in some sense lies both within and beyond the laws of a particular time and place. (shrink)

Lankford’s (2013) essential empirical argument, which is based on evidence such as psychological autopsies, is that suicide attacks are caused by suicidality. By operationalizing this causal claim in a hypothetical experiment, I show the claim to be provable, and I contend that its truth is supported by Lankford’s data. However, I question the success of his follow-on arguments about beauty and goodness.

Many discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the bodily experience of space turn to his opus Phenomenology of Perception, where he most explicitly takes up the theme. Yet in Merleau-Ponty’s own view this treatment, while providing rich and valuable insights into spatial experience, remains unsatisfying: ultimately Phenomenology of Perception does not escape a dualism that, despite the work’s inestimable contributions to the philosophy of embodied experience, situates it within a flawed tradition running back through Husserl, Kant, and Descartes. As Merleau-Ponty himself (...) puts it, “The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction.” 1 Only in his later philosophy, particularly with his development of the ontology of the flesh, did he approach the fulfillment of his goal to leave this distinction and all its Cartesian corollaries behind once and for all. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...) fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the first Critique in light of the foregoing, and discuss the broader implications of my analysis. (shrink)

The work of Richard H. Popkin both introduced the concept of skeptical fideism and served to impressively document its importance in the philosophies of a diverse range of thinkers, including Montaigne, Pascal, Huet, and Bayle. Popkin’s landmark History of Scepticism, however, begins its coverage with the Renaissance. In this paper I explore the roots of skeptical fideism in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with special attention to Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, the oldest surviving text to clearly develop a skeptical fideist (...) perspective. (shrink)

The Equal Weight View of disagreement says that if an agent sees that an epistemic peer disagrees with her about p, the agent should change her credence in p to half way between her initial credence, and the peer’s credence. But it is hard to believe the Equal Weight View for a surprising reason; not everyone believes it. And that means that if one did believe it, one would be required to lower one’s belief in it in light of this (...) peer disagreement. Brian Weatherson explores the options for how a proponent of the Equal Weight View might respond to this difficulty, and how this challenge fits into broader arguments against the Equal Weight View. (shrink)

Wittgenstein asks: “Now what do the words of this language signify?—What is supposed to shew what they signify, if not the kind of use they have?” Might one answer that rhetorical question by giving a compositional semantics for Wittgenstein’s builder language?

In a series of recent works, Kit Fine, 605–631, 2003, 2007) has sketched a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle. Radically departing from previous solutions, Fine argues that Frege’s puzzle forces us to reject compositionality. In this paper we first provide an explicit formalization of the relational semantics for first-order logic suggested, but only briefly sketched, by Fine. We then show why the relational semantics alone is technically inadequate, forcing Fine to enrich the syntax with a coordination schema. Given this enrichment, (...) we argue, that that the semantics is compositional. We then examine the deep consequences of this result for Fine’s proposed solution to Frege’s puzzle. We argue that Fine has mis-diagnosed his own solution–his attempted solution does not deny compositionality. The correct characterization of Fine’s solution fits him more comfortably among familiar solutions to the puzzle. (shrink)

Gossip is rarely praised. There seems little virtuous that is about talking behind someone’s back. Whether there is anything virtuous about gossip, however, depends on the kind of gossip. Some gossip is idle, but some evaluative gossip promulgates and enforces norms. When properly motivated, such gossip effects positive change in society and counts as gossiping well. The virtue of gossiping well even includes some kinds of false gossip, namely the sort that exaggerates a pre-existing trait, thereby creating a caricature of (...) a person’s character in order to establish a moral exemplar (or anti-exemplar). (shrink)

The importance of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e. the categories) within Kant’s system of philosophy is undeniable. As I hope to make clear in this essay, however, the categories are also an essential part of Kant’s critique of Christian Wolff. In particular, I argue that Kant’s development of the categories represents a decisive break with the Wolffian conception of the understanding and that this break is central to understanding the task of the Transcendental Analytic. This break, however, is (...) not merely that Kant affirms while Wolff and his followers deny a sharp distinction between sensibility and the understanding, which is the aspect of Kant’s rejection of Wolff that scholars most frequently note. Rather, this break concerns differences in their views about the understanding itself. For while Wolff conceives of the understanding as a mental capacity to extract and make distinct content already present in the senses, Kant conceives of the understanding in its “real use” as a capacity to produce purely intellectual content. (shrink)

List of Illustrations Introduction 1 The Didactic and the Elegant: Some Thoughts on Scientific and Technological Illustrations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 3 2 Temples of the Body and Temples of the Cosmos: Vision and Visualization in the Vesalian and Copernican Revolutions 40 3 Descartes’s Scientific Illustrations and ’la grande mecanique de la nature’ 86 4 Illustrating Chemistry 135 5 Representations of the Natural System in the Nineteenth Century 164 6 Visual Representation in Archaeology: Depicting the Missing-Link in Human (...) Origins 184 7 Towards an Epistemology of Scientific Illustration 215 8 Illustration and Inference 250 9 Visual Models and Scientific Judgment 269 10 Are Pictures Really Necessary? The Case of Sewall Wright’s ’Adaptive Landscapes’ 303 Bibliography 339 Notes on Contributors 373 Index 377. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRational agents have consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this (...) essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, a... (shrink)

The preface paradox can be motivated by appealing to a plausible inference from an author’s reasonable assertion that her book is bound to contain errors to the author’s rational belief that her book contains errors. By evaluating and undermining the validity of this inference, I offer a resolution of the paradox. Discussions of the preface paradox have surprisingly failed to note that expressions of fallibility made in prefaces typically employ terms such as surely, undoubtedly, and bound to be. After considering (...) what these terms mean, I show that the motivating inference is invalid. Moreover, I argue that a closer consideration of our expressions of fallibility suggest that epistemically responsible authors would not be rational to believe that their books contain errors. I conclude by considering alternative expressions of fallibility that employ terms such as possible and probable, and discuss the role that expressions of fallibility play in conversation. (shrink)

It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I introduce a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontology, but is often overlooked: between a social entity’s “grounds” and its “anchors.” For both, I argue that intentions, either individual or collective, are less essential than many theorists have assumed. Instead, I propose a more worldly – (...) and less intellectualist – approach to social ontology. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the assumptions behind Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, contending that Hegel’s concern with the rational structure of experience, his valorization of reflection over ordinary experience and his idea of the necessit y of progress in knowledge cannot be accommodated within the framework of semantic pragmatism. The central contentions are that Brandom’s pragmatism never comes to terms with Hegel’s idea of truth as a result, leading to a historicist distortion, and also that Brandom’s failure to deal with (...) Hegel’s distinction between natural consciousness and the phenomenological observer collapses Hegel’s phenomenology into a philosophy restricted to the level of natural consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a Bayesian analysis of the well-known surprise exam paradox. Central to our analysis is a probabilistic account of what it means for the student to accept the teacher's announcement that he will receive a surprise exam. According to this account, the student can be said to have accepted the teacher's announcement provided he adopts a subjective probability distribution relative to which he expects to receive the exam on a day on which he expects not to (...) receive it. We show that as long as expectation is not equated with subjective certainty there will be contexts in which it is possible for the student to accept the teacher's announcement, in this sense. In addition, we show how a Bayesian modeling of the scenario can yield plausible explanations of the following three intuitive claims: (1) the teacher's announcement becomes easier to accept the more days there are in class; (2) a strict interpretation of the teacher's announcement does not provide the student with any categorical information as to the date of the exam; and (3) the teacher's announcement contains less information about the date of the exam the more days there are in class. To conclude, we show how the surprise exam paradox can be seen as one among the larger class of paradoxes of doxastic fallibilism, foremost among which is the paradox of the preface. (shrink)

One's inaccuracy for a proposition is defined as the squared difference between the truth value (1 or 0) of the proposition and the credence (or subjective probability, or degree of belief) assigned to the proposition. One should have the epistemic goal of minimizing the expected inaccuracies of one's credences. We show that the method of minimizing expected inaccuracy can be used to solve certain probability problems involving information loss and self-locating beliefs (where a self-locating belief of a temporal part of (...) an individual is a belief about where or when that temporal part is located). We analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, the duplication version of the Sleeping Beauty problem, and various related problems. (shrink)

Review and response to Gimbel’s Isn’t That Clever.

It is suggested that the impetus to generate models is probably the most fundamental point of connection between mysticism and psychology. In their concern with the relation between ‘unseen’ realms and the ‘seen’, mystical maps parallel cognitive models of the relation between ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ processes. The map or model constitutes an explanation employing terms current within the respective canon. The case of language mysticism is examined to illustrate the premise that cognitive models may benefit from an understanding of the (...) kinds of experiences gained, and explanatory concepts advanced, within mystical traditions. Language mysticism is of particular interest on account of the central role thought to be played by language in relation to self and the individual's construction of reality. The discussion focuses on traditions of language mysticism within Judaism, in which emphasis is placed on the deconstruction of language into primary elements and the overarching significance of the divine Name. Analysis of the detailed techniques used suggests ways in which multiple associations to any given word/concept were consciously explored in an altered state. It appears that these mystics were consciously engaging with what are normally preconscious cognitive processes, whereby schematic associations to sensory images or thoughts are activated. The testimony from their writings implies that these mystics experienced distortions of the sense of self , which may suggest that, in the normal state, ‘I’ is constructed in relation to the preconscious system of associations. Moreover, an important feature of Hebrew language mysticism is its emphasis on embodiment -- specific associations were deemed to exist between the letters and each structure of the body. Implications, first, for the relationship between language and self, and, second, for the role of embodiment in relation to self are discussed. The importance of the continual emphasis on the Name of God throughout the linguistic practices may have provided a means for effectively replacing the cognitive indexing function hypothesized here to be normally played by ‘I’ with a more transpersonal cognitive index, especially in relation to memory. (shrink)

Individualists about social ontology hold that social facts are “built out of” facts about individuals. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct kinds of individualism about social ontology, two different ways individual people might be the metaphysical “builders” of the social world. The familiar kind is ontological individualism. This is the thesis that social facts supervene on, or are exhaustively grounded by, facts about individual people. What I call anchor individualism is the alternative thesis that facts about (...) individuals put in place the conditions for a social entity to exist, or the conditions for something to have a social property. Examples include conventionalist theories of the social world, such as David Hume’s theories of promises, money, and government, and collective acceptance theories, such as John Searle’s theory of institutional facts. Anchor individualism is often conflated with ontological individualism. But in fact, the two theses are in tension with one another: if one of these kinds of individualism is true, then the other is very unlikely to be. My aim in this paper is to clarify both, and argue that they should be sharply distinguished from one another. (shrink)

In this issue, Ahmadi1 reports on the practice of hymenoplasty—a surgical intervention meant to restore a presumed physical marker of virginity prior to a woman's marriage. As Mehri and Sills2 have stated, these women ‘want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.’ Although Ahmadi's research was carried out in Iran specifically, this surgery is becoming increasingly popular in a number of Western countries as well, especially among Muslim populations.3 What are the ethics of hymen restoration?Consider the (...) role of the physician. Two of the doctors interviewed by Ahmadi reported being in ‘a perpetual state of guilt because of the surgery's inherent aim at deceiving the groom’ and noted their ‘personal conflict’ at being involved in this deception. Yet: "None of the doctors believed that the surgery was unethical, arguing that the girl could be ‘abused’ and ‘can even die’ if she is discovered not … ". (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive (...) ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Quine insisted that the satisfaction of an open modalised formula by an object depends on how that object is described. Kripke's ‘objectual’ interpretation of quantified modal logic, whereby variables are rigid, is commonly thought to avoid these Quinean worries. Yet there remain residual Quinean worries for epistemic modality. Theorists have recently been toying with assignment-shifting treatments of epistemic contexts. On such views an epistemic operator ends up binding all the variables in its scope. One might worry that this yields (...) the undesirable result that any attempt to ‘quantify in’ to an epistemic environment is blocked. If quantifying into the relevant constructions is vacuous, then such views would seem hopelessly misguided and empirically inadequate. But a famous alternative to Kripke's semantics, namely Lewis' counterpart semantics, also faces this worry since it also treats the boxes and diamonds as assignment-shifting devices. As I'll demonstrate, the mere fact that a variable is bound is no obstacle to binding it. This provides a helpful lesson for those modelling de re epistemic contexts with assignment sensitivity, and perhaps leads the way toward the proper treatment of binding in both metaphysical and epistemic contexts: Kripke for metaphysical modality, Lewis for epistemic modality. (shrink)