Is there a distinctively epistemic kind of blame? It has become commonplace for epistemologists to talk about epistemic blame, and to rely on this notion for theoretical purposes. But not everyone is convinced. Some of the most compelling reasons for skepticism about epistemic blame focus on disanologies, or asymmetries, between the moral and epistemic domains. In this paper, I defend the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. I do so primarily by developing an account of the (...) nature of epistemic blame. My account draws on a prominent line of theorizing in moral philosophy that ties blame to our relationships with one another. I argue that with my account of epistemic blame on hand, the most compelling worries about epistemic blame can be deflated. There is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of recent work on epistemic blame. The paper identifies key features of the concept of epistemic blame and discusses two ways of motivating the importance of this concept. Four different approaches to the nature of epistemic blame are examined. Central issues surrounding the ethics and value of epistemic blame are identified and briefly explored. In addition to providing an overview of the state of the art of this growing but controversial field, the paper highlights (...) areas where future work is needed. (shrink)

One challenge in developing an account of the nature of epistemic blame is to explain what differentiates epistemic blame from mere negative epistemic evaluation. The challenge is to explain the difference, without invoking practices or behaviors that seem out of place in the epistemic domain. In this paper, I examine whether the most sophisticated recent account of the nature of epistemic blame—due to Jessica Brown—is up for the challenge. I argue that the account ultimately falls short, but does so in (...) an instructive way. Drawing on the lessons learned, I put forward an alternative approach to the nature of epistemic blame. My account understands epistemic blame in terms of modifications to the intentions and expectations that comprise our “epistemic relationships” with one another. This approach has a number of attractions shared by Brown’s account, but it can also explain the significance of epistemic blame. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to (...) a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain. (shrink)

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are solely responsible for deaths (...) and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies. (shrink)

A plausible condition on having the standing to blame someone is that the target of blame's wrongdoing must in some sense be your “business”—the wrong must in some sense harm or affect you, or others close to you. This is known as the business condition on standing to blame. Many cases of epistemic blame discussed in the literature do not obviously involve examples of someone harming or affecting another. As such, not enough has been said about how an individual's epistemic (...) failing can really count as another person's business. In this paper, I deploy a relationship-based account of epistemic blame to clarify the conditions under which the business condition can be met in the epistemic domain. The basic idea is that one person's epistemic failing can be another's business in virtue of the way it impairs their epistemic relationship. (shrink)

The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole have (...) had different parts. In this paper I attempt to offer an account of parthood that is intimate enough but not too intimate: the parts generate the whole, but they are not themselves the whole. (shrink)

The paper critically examines recent work on justifications and excuses in epistemology. I start with a discussion of Gerken’s claim that the “excuse maneuver” is ad hoc. Recent work from Timothy Williamson and Clayton Littlejohn provides resources to advance the debate. Focusing in particular on a key insight in Williamson’s view, I then consider an additional worry for the so-called excuse maneuver. I call it the “excuses are not enough” objection. Dealing with this objection generates pressure in two directions: one (...) is to show that excuses are a positive enough normative standing to help certain externalists with important cases; the other is to do so in a way that does not lead back to Gerken’s objection. I show how a Williamson-inspired framework is flexible enough to deal with both sources of pressure. Perhaps surprisingly, I draw on recent virtue epistemology. (shrink)

Blameless norm violation in young children is an underexplored phenomenon in epistemology. An understanding of it is important for accounting for the full range of normative standings at issue in debates about epistemic norms, and the internalism-externalism debate generally. More specifically, it is important for proponents of factive epistemic norms. I examine this phenomenon and put forward a positive proposal. I claim that we should think of the normative dimension of certain actions and attitudes of young children in terms of (...) a kind of “prospective agency”. I argue that the most sophisticated account of exculpatory defenses in epistemology – due to Clayton Littlejohn – does not provide an adequate model for exculpatory defenses of prospective agents. The aim is not primarily to challenge Littlejohn. Rather, I engage with his framework as a way of setting up my positive proposal. I call it the “heuristic model”. (shrink)

I respond to Tim Smartt’s (2023) skepticism about epistemic blame. Smartt’s skepticism is based on the claims that (i) mere negative epistemic evaluation can better explain everything proponents of epistemic blame say we need epistemic blame to explain; and (ii) no existing account of epistemic blame provides a plausible account of the putative force that any response deserving the label “blame” ought to have. He focuses primarily on the prominent “relationship-based” account of epistemic blame to defend these claims, arguing that (...) the account is explanatorily idle, and cannot distinguish between epistemically excused and epistemically blameworthy agents. I argue that Smartt mischaracterizes the account’s role for judgments of epistemic relationship impairment, leading to mistaken claims about the account’s predictions. I also argue that the very feature of the account that Smartt mischaracterizes is key to understanding what epistemic blame does for our epistemic responsibility practices that mere negative epistemic evaluation cannot. (shrink)

How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities (...) to an exaggerated sense of typical human performance. I dub this error “anthropofabulation”, since it combines anthropocentrism with confabulation about our own prowess. Anthropofabulation has long distorted the debate about animal minds, but it is a bias that has been little discussed and against which the Canon provides no protection. Luckily, there is a venerable corrective against anthropofabulation: a principle offered long ago by David Hume, which I call “Hume’s Dictum”. In this paper, I argue that Hume’s Dictum deserves a privileged place next to Morgan’s Canon in the methodology of comparative psychology, illustrating my point through a discussion of the debate over Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

In De Anima 2.4, Aristotle claims that nutritive soul encompasses two distinct biological functions: nutrition and reproduction. We challenge a pervasive interpretation which posits ‘nutrients’ as the correlative object of the nutritive capacity. Instead, the shared object of nutrition and reproduction is that which is nourished and reproduced: the ensouled body, qua ensouled. Both functions aim at preserving this object, and thus at preserving the form, life, and being of the individual organism. In each case, we show how Aristotle’s detailed (...) biological analysis supports this ontological argument. (shrink)

Our prominent definitions of cognition are too vague and lack empirical grounding. They have not kept up with recent developments, and cannot bear the weight placed on them across many different debates. I here articulate and defend a more adequate theory. On this theory, behaviors under the control of cognition tend to display a cluster of characteristic properties, a cluster which tends to be absent from behaviors produced by non-cognitive processes. This cluster is reverse-engineered from the empirical tests that comparative (...) psychologists use to determine whether a behavior was generated by a cognitive or a non-cognitive process. Cognition should be understood as the natural kind of psychological process that non-accidentally exhibits the properties assessed by these tests (as well as others we have not yet discovered). Finally, I review two plausible neural accounts of cognition's underlying mechanisms?one based in localization of function to particular brain regions and another based in the more recent distributed networks approach to neuroscience?which would explain why these properties non-accidentally cluster. While this notion of cognition may be useful for a number of debates, I here focus on its application to a recent crisis over the distinction between cognition and association in comparative psychology. (shrink)

Is there an epistemic analogue of moral motivational internalism? The answer to this question has implications for our understanding of the nature of epistemic normativity. For example, some philosophers have argued from claims that epistemic judgement is not necessarily motivating to the view that epistemic judgement is not normative. This paper examines the options for spelling out an epistemic analogue of moral motivational internalism. It is argued that the most promising approach connects epistemic judgements to doxastic dispositions, which are related (...) to motivation in a fairly tenuous sense. It is also argued that this approach currently lacks a plausible and informative account of the nature and workings of these doxastic dispositions, and, hence, an explanation of the range of phenomena internalist theses typically set out to explain. The most promising route for developing such an account, based on recent expressivist work, is investigated and found inadequate for the task. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this (...) debate do not agree on criteria for representation. As such, future debate should either abandon the representational idiom or confront underlying semantic disagreements. (shrink)

One typical aim of responsibilist virtue epistemology is to employ the notion of intellectual virtue in pursuit of an ameliorative epistemology. This paper focuses on “political inquiry” as a case study for examining the ameliorative value of intellectual virtue. The main claim is that the case of political inquiry threatens to expose responsibilist virtue epistemology in a general way as focusing too narrowly on the role of individual intellectual character traits in attempting to improve our epistemic practices.

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors (...) We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

The chapter develops a taxonomy of views about the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Prominent approaches to epistemic democracy, epistocracy, epistemic libertarianism, and pure proceduralism are examined through the lens of this taxonomy. The primary aim is to explore options for developing an account of the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The chapter also argues that a number of recent attacks on democracy may not adequately register the availability of a minimal approach to the epistemic responsibilities (...) of citizens in a democracy. (shrink)

We regularly make graded normative judgements in the epistemic domain. Recent work in the literature examines degrees of justification, degrees of rationality, and degrees of assertability. This paper addresses a different dimension of the gradeability of epistemic normativity, one that has been given little attention. How should we understand degrees of epistemic criticizability? In virtue of what sorts of factors can one epistemic failing be worse than another? The paper develops a dual-factor view of degrees of epistemic criticizability. According to (...) the view, degrees of epistemic criticizability are (i) an inverse function of degrees of doxastic justification and (ii) a function of degrees of agent culpability. The paper develops an account of each factor, and explains how they should be weighted. The paper also addresses the importance of modelling degrees of epistemic criticizability in a broader context. I focus on the role that such a model can play in the ethics of epistemic criticism. (shrink)

The functionalist approach to kinds has suffered recently due to its association with law-based approaches to induction and explanation. Philosophers of science increasingly view nomological approaches as inappropriate for the special sciences like psychology and biology, which has led to a surge of interest in approaches to natural kinds that are more obviously compatible with mechanistic and model-based methods, especially homeostatic property cluster theory. But can the functionalist approach to kinds be weaned off its dependency on laws? Dan Weiskopf has (...) recently offered a reboot of the functionalist program by replacing its nomological commitments with a model-based approach more closely derived from practice in psychology. Roughly, Weiskopf holds that the natural kinds of psychology will be the functional properties that feature in many empirically successful cognitive models, and that those properties need not be localized to parts of an underlying mechanism. I here skeptically examine the three modeling practices that Weiskopf thinks introduce such non-localizable properties: fictionalization, reification, and functional abstraction. In each case, I argue that recognizing functional properties introduced by these practices as autonomous kinds comes at clear cost to those explanations’ counterfactual explanatory power. At each step, a tempting functionalist response is parochialism: to hold that the false or omitted counterfactuals fall outside the modeler’s explanatory aims, and so should not be counted against functional kinds. I conclude by noting the dangers this attitude poses to scientific disagreement, inviting functionalists to better articulate how the individuation conditions for functional kinds might outstrip the perspective of a single modeler. (shrink)

Epistemological Disjunctivism is a view about paradigm cases of perceptual knowledge. Duncan Pritchard claims that it is particularly well suited to accounting for internalist and externalist intuitions. A number of authors have disputed this claim, arguing that there are problems for Pritchard’s way with internalist intuitions. I share the worry. However, I don’t think it has been expressed as effectively as it can be. My aim in this paper is to present a new way of formulating the worry, in terms (...) of an “explanatory challenge”. The explanatory challenge is a simple, yet powerful and illuminating challenge for Epistemological Disjunctivism. It is illuminating in the sense that it shows us why Epistemological Disjunctivism must take on certain internalistically problematic commitments. A secondary aim of this paper is to examine whether the recently much-discussed distinction between justifications and excuses in epistemology can support an adequate response. I will argue that it cannot. (shrink)

As inductive decision-making procedures, the inferences made by machine learning programs are subject to underdetermination by evidence and bear inductive risk. One strategy for overcoming these challenges is guided by a presumption in philosophy of science that inductive inferences can and should be value-free. Applied to machine learning programs, the strategy assumes that the influence of values is restricted to data and decision outcomes, thereby omitting internal value-laden design choice points. In this paper, I apply arguments from feminist philosophy of (...) science to machine learning programs to make the case that the resources required to respond to these inductive challenges render critical aspects of their design constitutively value-laden. I demonstrate these points specifically in the case of recidivism algorithms, arguing that contemporary debates concerning fairness in criminal justice risk-assessment programs are best understood as iterations of traditional arguments from inductive risk and demarcation, and thereby establish the value-laden nature of automated decision-making programs. Finally, in light of these points, I address opportunities for relocating the value-free ideal in machine learning and the limitations that accompany them. (shrink)

Why is it that some instances of disagreement appear to be so intractable? And what is the appropriate way to handle such disagreements, especially concerning matters about which there are important practical and political needs for us to come to a consensus? In this paper, I consider an explanation of the apparent intractability of deep disagreement offered by hinge epistemology. According to this explanation, at least some deep disagreements are rationally unresolvable because they concern ‘hinge’ commitments that are unresponsive to (...) rational considerations. This explanation, if correct, seems to have troubling implications for how we should respond to deep disagreement. If my position on a topic is not responsive to rational considerations, then what choice have I but to dogmatically hold to that position, and simply dismiss the views of those with whom I disagree? I address this problem by identifying an attitude of intellectual humility that is appropriate to have towards one's hinge commitments, and suggest that this attitude provides the basis for a non-rational, constructive way to resolve deep disagreement. (shrink)

Why comply with epistemic norms? In this paper, I argue that complying with epistemic norms, engaging in epistemically responsible conduct, and being epistemically trustworthy are constitutive elements of maintaining good epistemic relations with oneself and others. Good epistemic relations are in turn both instrumentally and finally valuable: they enable the kind of coordination and knowledge acquisition underpinning much of what we tend to associate with a flourishing human life; and just as good interpersonal relations with others can be good for (...) their own sake, standing in good epistemic relations is good for its own sake. On my account, we have reason to comply with epistemic norms because it is a way of respecting the final value of something that also tends to be an instrumentally valuable thing: good epistemic relations. Situating the account within the recent social turn in debates about epistemic instrumentalism, I argue that the dual‐value aspect of good epistemic relations can explain important anti‐instrumentalist intuitions, in a well‐motivated way, within a broadly instrumentalist framework. (shrink)

The main objection to pragmatism about knowledge is that it entails that truth-irrelevant factors can make a difference to knowledge. Blake Roeber [2018. “Anti-Intellectualism.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 127: 437–466] has recently argued that this objection fails. I agree with Roeber. But in this paper, I present another way of thinking about the dispute between purists and pragmatists about knowledge. I do so by formulating a new objection to pragmatism about knowledge. This is that pragmatism about knowledge entails (...) that factors irrelevant to both truth and ‘cognitive agency’ can make a difference to knowledge. An interesting additional upshot of my argument is the connection revealed between the debate between pragmatists and purists about knowledge, and the debate between ‘alethists’ and pragmatists about reasons for belief. (shrink)

I here critique the application of the traditional, similarity-based account of natural kinds to debates in psychology. A challenge to such accounts of kindhood—familiar from the study of biological species—is a metaphysical phenomenon that I call ‘transitional gradation’: the systematic progression of slightly modified transitional forms between related candidate kinds. Where such gradation proliferates, it renders the selection of similarity criteria for kinds arbitrary. Reflection on general features of learning—especially on the gradual revision of concepts throughout the acquisition of expertise—shows (...) that even the strongest candidates for similarity-based kinds in psychology exhibit systematic transitional gradation. As a result, philosophers of psychology should abandon discussion of kindhood, or explore non-similarity based accounts. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that political envy is central to unraveling the racial dynamics in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. Building upon Sara Protasi’s taxonomy of envy and, in particular, from her analysis of some DTRT scenes, we conduct a more thorough interrogation of how political emotions, most notably envy, shape race relations in the film. We start by summarizing Protasi’s account of envy and then review two alternative accounts of political emotions. After elucidating what envy is and (...) how it becomes politically valenced, we analyze three key scenes that are the most emblematic of political envy: 1) a discussion between three Black characters on the street corner, 2) an exchange between the film’s main character, Mookie, and his racist co-worker, Pino; and 3) the film’s climactic riot sequence. Our analysis of these three scenes, in addition to complementing previous readings of Do The Right Thing, highlight envy’s potential to either impede or promote political action. (shrink)

There is a widely accepted distinction between being directly responsible for a wrongdoing versus being somehow indirectly or vicariously responsible for the wrongdoing of another person or collective. Often this is couched in analyses of complicity, and complicity’s role in the relationship between individual and collective wrongdoing. Complicity is important because, inter alia, it allows us to make sense of individuals who may be blameless or blameworthy to a relatively low degree for their immediate conduct, but are nevertheless blameworthy to (...) a higher degree for their implication in some larger (or another person’s) wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of complicity. First, I motivate the distinction between direct and vicarious responsibility with three interlocking arguments, respectively appealing to: i) the structure of rational agency; ii) linguistic considerations; iii) the role of “principal vs. accomplice” in legal doctrine. I show how these arguments naturally extend to the epistemic domain, motivating an epistemic form of vicarious responsibility. I then examine complicity as a mechanism of vicarious epistemic responsibility. To fill this out, I engage with an epistemic analogue of the debate about the role of intention versus causal contribution in complicity. I propose a Casual Account of Epistemic Complicity, arguing that it accommodates a wide range of cases, and enables fine-grained explanations of degrees of culpability for epistemic complicity. With an adequate account of epistemic complicity on hand, we can explain what is objectionable about an important class of epistemic agent who, on an individual level, may be epistemically blameless or blameworthy to a relatively low degree, but whose relation to other individuals or collectives nevertheless makes them epistemically blameworthy to a higher degree. I explore some broader implications of this result. (shrink)

Non-well-founded set theories allow set-theoretic exotica that standard ZFC will not allow, such as a set that has itself as its sole member. We can distinguish plenitudinous non-well-founded set theories, such as Boffa set theory, that allow infinitely many such sets, from restrictive theories, such as Finsler-Aczel or AFA, that allow exactly one. Plenitudinous non-well-founded set theories face a puzzle: nothing seems to explain the identity or distinctness of various of the sets they countenance. In this paper I aim to (...) sharpen this puzzle, make clear who it does and does not apply to and, ultimately, to argue in favor of a plenitudinous theory like Boffa. (shrink)

This paper explores the complex nature of social biases, arguing for a functional framework that recognizes their unity and diversity. The functional approach posits that all biases share a common functional role in overcoming underdetermination. This framework, I argue, provides a comprehensive understanding of how all psychological biases, including social biases, are unified. I then turn to the question of disunity, demonstrating how psychological social biases differ systematically in the mental states and processes that constitute them. These differences indicate that (...) biases at various levels of the cognitive architecture require distinct treatment along at least two dimensions: epistemic evaluation and mitigation strategies. By examining social biases through this dual lens of unity and diversity, we can more effectively identify when and how to intervene on problematic biases. Ultimately, this approach provides a nuanced understanding of the nature of social bias, offering practical guidance for addressing existing biases and proactively managing emerging biases in both human and artificial minds. (shrink)

Recent work in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact such theories have upon moral judgments about racial discrimination. The results (...) show that different theories differ in their impact on moral judgments: when implicit biases are defined as unconscious, people hold the biased agent less morally responsible than when these biases are defined as automatic (i.e., difficult to control), or when no theory of implicit bias is provided. (shrink)

Two arguments in Eudemian Ethics 2 that are crucial to Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as a mean state contain claims that Aristotle says are clear by induction. In these contexts, he explicitly appeals to examples coming from arts and sciences like gymnastic training and medicine for evidence. But Aristotle does not here, or elsewhere (at least in any extant work), including the parallel arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics, actually supply or discuss the evidence that makes these inductive arguments clear. (...) Fortunately, strong support for them can be found in the Hippocratic Corpus, especially in On Ancient Medicine and On Regimen. (shrink)

Does Aristotle offer a definition of the soul? In fact, he rejects the possibility of defining the soul univocally. Because “life” is a homonymous concept, so too is “soul”. Given the specific causal role that Aristotle envisages for form and essence, the soul requires multiple different definitions to capture how it functions as a cause in each form of life. Aristotle suggests demonstrations can be given which express these causal definitions; I reconstruct these demonstrations.

Contemporary discussion of biological teleology has been dominated by a complacent orthodoxy. Responsibility for this shortcoming rests primarily, I think, with those who ought to have been challenging dogma but have remained silent, leaving the orthodox to grow soft, if happily. In this silence, champions of orthodoxy have declared a signal victory, proclaiming the dominance of their view as one of philosophy’s historic successes. But this declaration is premature at best—this would be neither the first nor probably the last time (...) that a narrow school of philosophy has declared the resolution of age-old problems only to have those problems rise from the ashes of their better selves when a broader view is articulated. I propose to challenge orthodoxy by undermining its fundamental assumption and to enlist the help of others in articulating a formidable heterodox alternative to contemporary dogma concerning biological teleology, perhaps on the model I sketch below. (shrink)

An interruption. Rethinking the first three chapters of this book, I have come to suspect that, not unlike Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas, the way I imagine ‘ethics’ floats on an idea that any ethical substantive position or ethical theory is always shaped through our existential condition and our embodied encounter with others. To Murdoch, existence is the disposition for our responses to the ways in which we perceive reality, and yet, although these responses are always part of who we (...) are, they are not always part of what we do, and so, we set ourselves ethical tasks when we desire to act ethically. As scholar Bridget Clarke argues, “to attend to something [for Murdoch] is to approach it with a just and loving eye, and therewith to perceive it in its unbounded particularity and complexity, and so, as it truly is.” Or as I argue, to attend to the other ‘justly and lovingly’, Murdoch would instruct, is not merely to accurately collect details about the other and then arrive at an approximation of its being, but also to apprehend the other as ‘distinctly singular’ and ‘distinctly foreign’ from oneself–which at once forgoes any assimilation of the other into oneself, incidentally. The recognition of the other as ‘one who embodies human otherness and dignity’ becomes the condition for and coherent way of imagining and accessing moral reality. Moreover, for Diane Davis, this “being-for-the-other names a pre-originary obligation to respond to the other [and] it is in this response that both the self and the other emerge as existents” whose ethical projects are each challenged by the markedly different and infinitely other being. This obligation, Levinas might also say, is an ‘authority’ that is experienced like the effect of the other upon me, so that I am subsequently motivated to enact ethical task-making. I am not, therefore, “pulling everything other into the same, the known, the comprehended,” nor am I looking to any normative theories as authoritative templates from which I act ethically. And so, unlike Husserl, I am not “joining the philosophical tradition in its fundamental disrespect for all things other,” but instead, by dispositioning myself between these theories in responsible Levinasian fashion, I will be tracking them in response to their confronting me, and not as normative theories that are applicable to real and lived experiences. (shrink)

Evaluating counterfactuals in worlds with deterministic laws poses a puzzle. In a wide array of cases, it does not seem plausible that if a non-actual event were to occur that either the past would be different or that the laws would be different. But it’s also difficult to see how we can avoid this result. Some philosophers have argued that we can avoid this dilemma by allowing that a proposition can be a law even though it has violations. On this (...) view, for the relevant cases, the past and the laws would still hold, but the laws would have a violation. In this paper, I raise a problem for the claim that the laws and the past are preserved for all of the relevant counterfactual antecedents. I further argue that this problem undermines motivating the possibility of violations on the grounds that they allow us to hold that the past and the laws are typically counterfactually preserved, even if they are not always preserved. (shrink)

There is a distinction between merely having the right belief, and further basing that belief on the right reasons. Any adequate epistemology needs to be able to accommodate the basing relation that marks this distinction. However, trouble arises for Bayesianism. I argue that when we combine Bayesianism with the standard approaches to the basing relation, we get the result that no agent forms their credences in the right way; indeed, no agent even gets close. This is a serious problem, for (...) it prevents us from making epistemic distinctions between agents that are doing a reasonably good job at forming their credences and those that are forming them in clearly bad ways. I argue that if this result holds, then we have a problem for Bayesianism. However, I show how the Bayesian can avoid this problem by rejecting the standard approaches to the basing relation. By drawing on recent work on the basing relation, we can develop an account of the relation that allows us to avoid the result that no agent comes close to forming their credences in the right way. The Bayesian can successfully accommodate the basing relation. (shrink)

For A. J. Ayer, the occurrence of delusions confutes the notion that we perceive the world directly. He argues instead that perceptions are caused by immaterial “sense data” which somehow represent the properties of material things to us in our experiences. J. L. Austin systematically rejects Ayer’s claims, arguing that the occurrence of delusions does not preclude the possibility of direct perception, and that, indeed, our normal perception is direct. I challenge both philosophers’ ideas by examining how they deal with (...) the phenomenon of colour. (shrink)

A prominent objection to the knowledge norm of belief is that it is too demanding or too strong. The objection is commonly framed in terms of the idea that there is a tight connection between norm violation and the appropriateness of criticism or blame. In this paper I do two things. First, I argue that this way of motivating the objection leads to an impasse in the epistemic norms debate. It leads to an impasse when knowledge normers invoke excuses to (...) explain away a prima facie connection between blamelessness and justified belief. Second, I argue that a way out of the impasse becomes available when we take a closer look at some distinctions in the theory of responsibility. There are at least three different notions of responsibility relevant here. I argue that a weaker notion of responsibility – attributability – should be used to motivate the objection that the knowledge norm of belief is too strong. Insofar as the proposal motivates the objection without appeal to blamelessness, it opens up space to move beyond the impasse. (shrink)

Modern philosophy is, for what appear to be good reasons, uniformly hostile to sui generis final causes. And motivated to develop philosophically and scientifically plausible interpretations, scholars have increasingly offered reductivist and eliminitivist accounts of Aristotle's teleological commitment. This trend in contemporary scholarship is misguided. We have strong grounds to believe Aristotle accepted unreduced sui generis teleology, and reductivist and eliminitivist accounts face insurmountable textual and philosophical difficulties. We offer Aristotelians cold comfort by replacing his apparent view with failed accounts. (...) And so we ought to admit Aristotle’s prima facie commitments and deal with — if not accept — the consequences. (shrink)

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is (...) in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs. (shrink)

In this short paper, I critically examine Veli Mitova’s proposal that social-identity groups can have collective epistemic reasons. My primary focus is the role of privileged access in her account of how collective reasons become epistemic reasons for social-identity groups. I argue that there is a potentially worrying structural asymmetry in her account of two different types of cases. More specifically, the mechanisms at play in cases of “doxastic reasons” seem fundamentally different from those at play in cases of “epistemic-conduct (...) reasons”. The upshot is a need for further explanation of what unifies these dimensions of the account. (shrink)

Causal essentialists hold that a property essentially bears its causal and nomic relations. Further, as many causal essentialists have noted, the main motivations for causal essentialism also motivate holding that properties are individuated in terms of their causal and nomic relations. This amounts to a kind of identity of indiscernibles thesis; properties that are indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations are identical. This can be compared with the more well-known identity of indiscernibles thesis, according to which particulars (...) that are qualitatively indiscernible are identical. Robert Adams has developed a well-known objection to this thesis by considering a series of possibilities involving nearly qualitatively indiscernible particulars that naturally leads to a possibility involving qualitatively indiscernible particulars. I argue that we can construct parallel cases involving a series of possibilities involving properties that are nearly indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations that naturally lead to possibilities involving properties that are indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations. The same features that make Adams’ argument forceful also carry over to my cases, giving us a powerful objection to the causal essentialist identity of indiscernibles thesis. (shrink)

Plato’s references to Empedocles in the myth of the Statesman perform a crucial role in the overarching political argument of the dialogue. Empedocles conceives of the cosmos as structured like a democracy, where the constituent powers ‘rule in turn’, sharing the offices of rulership equally via a cyclical exchange of power. In a complex act of philosophical appropriation, Plato takes up Empedocles’ cosmic cycles of rule in order to ‘correct’ them: instead of a democracy in which rule is shared cyclically (...) amongst equal constituents, Plato’s cosmos undergoes cycles of the presence and absence of a single cosmic monarch who possesses ‘kingly epistēmē’. By means of a revision of Empedocles’ democratic cosmology, Plato’s richly woven myth is designed precisely to reject the appropriateness of democracy as a form of human political association and legitimate monarchy in its stead. (shrink)

In this opinion piece we propose the investigation of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). BDD is a psychiatric disorder characterised by appearance-based preoccupations and accompanying compulsions. While safe and effective treatments for BDD exist, non-response and relapse rates remain high. Therefore, there is a need to investigate promising new treatment options for this highly debilitating condition. Preliminary evidence suggests safety, feasibility, and potential efficacy of psychedelic treatments in disorders that share similar psychopathological mechanisms with BDD. (...) Drawing on this evidence, as well as on relevant qualitative reports and theoretical proposals, we argue that it would be worthwhile to conduct a phase 2a study aimed at assessing the safety and feasibility of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in BDD. We also offer some suggestions for how future research ought to proceed. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...) and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)

In some influential histories of ancient philosophy, teleological explanation and mechanistic explanation are assumed to be directly opposed and mutually exclusive alternatives. I contend that this assumption is deeply flawed, and distorts our understanding both of teleological and mechanistic explanation, and of the history of mechanistic philosophy. To prove this point, I shall provide an overview of the first systematic treatise on mechanics, the short and neglected work Mechanical Problems, written either by Aristotle or by a very early member of (...) his school. I will argue that the work is thoroughly Aristotelian in methodology, and that taking it seriously can deepen our understanding of Aristotle’s discussion of animal and human self-motion in the Physics and On the Movement of Animals. (shrink)

As many as you know, the title of this article was also the title of an international philosophy for children symposium held at the Menger Hotel in downtown San Antonio on April 12-14, 1989. The symposium was the culminating event of a year-long project in which third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers from four area schools implemented the philosophy for children program in their schools. In addition to a brief history of this project and a summary of the symposium and (...) related events, the paper concludes with reactions to this year long project from both teachers and students involved in the program. (shrink)

We examine moving spotlight theories of time: theories according to which there are past and future events and an objective present moment. In Section 1, we briefly discuss the origins of the view. In Section 2, we describe the traditional moving spotlight view, which we understand as an ‘enriched’ B-theory of time, and raise some problems for that view. In the next two sections, we describe versions of the moving spotlight view that we think are better and which solve those (...) problems. In Section 3, we describe a version of the view that combines permanentism – the thesis that all things always exist – with propositional temporalism, the thesis that some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false. In Section 4, we discuss a version of the view that is like an ‘enriched’ presentism. We conclude with some brief thoughts on issues that remain outstanding. (shrink)