The aim of the paper is to develop general criteria of argumentative validity and adequacy for probabilistic arguments on the basis of the epistemological approach to argumentation. In this approach, as in most other approaches to argumentation, proabilistic arguments have been neglected somewhat. Nonetheless, criteria for several special types of probabilistic arguments have been developed, in particular by Richard Feldman and Christoph Lumer. In the first part (sects. 2-5) the epistemological basis of probabilistic arguments is discussed. With regard to the (...) philosophical interpretation of probabilities a new subjectivist, epistemic interpretation is proposed, which identifies probabilities with tendencies of evidence (sect. 2). After drawing the conclusions of this interpretation with respect to the syntactic features of the probability concept, e.g. one variable referring to the data base (sect. 3), the justification of basic probabilities (priors) by judgements of relative frequency (sect. 4) and the justification of derivative probabilities by means of the probability calculus are explained (sect. 5). The core of the paper is the definition of '(argumentatively) valid derivative probabilistic arguments', which provides exact conditions for epistemically good probabilistic arguments, together with conditions for the adequate use of such arguments for the aim of rationally convincing an addressee (sect. 6). Finally, some measures for improving the applicability of probabilistic reasoning are proposed (sect. 7). (shrink)

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

Since 2023, the UK government's response to the “migrant crisis” has revolved around two controversial flagship policies: the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and the detention of migrants aboard a giant barge. In this short article, I examine the colonial and gendered dimensions of the two policies, finding them to be examples of the coloniality of gender. What this indicates, I suggest, is that the purpose of these policies is not merely to deter potential migrants—particularly LGBTQIA+ migrants—but also to (...) create a political narrative that allows the Conservative Party to garner right-wing votes by participating in high-profile culture wars; namely, the debate over transgender rights and the debate over how the UK should reckon with its imperial past. (shrink)

Serious actualism is the view that it is metaphysically impossible for an entity to have a property, or stand in a relation, and not exist. Fine (1985) and Pollock (1985) influentially argue that this view is false. In short, there are properties like the property of nonexistence, and it is metaphysically possible that some entity both exemplifies such a property and does not exist. I argue that such arguments are indeed successful against the standard formulation of serious actualism. However, I (...) also argue that we should distinguish a weaker formulation of serious actualism using the actualist distinction between truth in, and truth at, a possible world. This weaker formulation is then shown to be consistent with the existence and possible exemplification of properties like the property of nonexistence. I end with a novel argument for the truth of the weaker formulation. (shrink)

Serious actualists take it that all properties are existence entailing. I present a simple puzzle about sentence tokens which seems to show that serious actualism is false. I then consider the most promising response to the puzzle. This is the idea that the serious actualist should take ordinary property-talk to contain an implicit existential presupposition. I argue that this approach does not work: it fails to generalise appropriately to all sentence types and tokens. In particular, it fails to capture the (...) right distinctions we ought to make between what I call _typographical sentence types_—an interesting and previously undiscussed class of fine-grained sentence types which are partially individuated by their typography, or how they look when written out. (shrink)

The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years. Organisms have recently been described as complex systems that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and teleological structure. This perspective marks a significant advancement from the 20th-century viewpoint, which predominantly saw organisms as genetically programmed, randomly generated and blindly selected (...) survival-machines. However, crucial questions about the shape and development of organisms still lack answers. Shape and development are deeply interconnected and seem to require a holistic approach. Here, I will briefly outline a phenomenological perspective which could provide a framework for seeking answers to these fundamental questions. In particular, I propose a common four-fold phenomenal structure of the developing organism and the cognising consciousness, which makes it possible to observe the agential and teleological structure of the organism "from within". This fourfold structure also describes the molecular level and thus provides a general organismic concept. It furthermore corresponds to the four Aristotelian "causes" (conditions). (shrink)

Many researchers consider cancer to have molecular causes, namely mutated genes that result in abnormal cell proliferation (e.g. Weinberg 1998). For others, the causes of cancer are to be found not at the molecular level but at the tissue level where carcinogenesis consists of disrupted tissue organization with downward causation effects on cells and cellular components (e.g. Sonnenschein and Soto 2008). In this contribution, I ponder how to make sense of such downward causation claims. Adopting a manipulationist account of causation (...) (Woodward 2003), I propose a formal definition of downward causation and discuss further requirements (in light of Baumgartner 2009). I then show that such an account cannot be mobilized in support of non-reductive physicalism (contrary to Raatikainen 2010). However, I also argue that such downward causation claims might point at particularly interesting dynamic properties of causal relationships that might prove salient in characterizing causal relationships (following Woodward 2010). (shrink)

In the first chapter of his Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne argues that thinkers do not ordinarily know lottery propositions. His arguments depend on claims about the intimate connections between knowledge and assertion, epistemic possibility, practical reasoning, and theoretical reasoning. In this paper, we cast doubt on the proposed connections. We also put forward an alternative picture of belief and reasoning. In particular, we argue that assertion is governed by a Gricean constraint that makes no reference to knowledge, and that (...) practical reasoning has more to do with rational degrees of belief than with states of knowledge. (shrink)

This article presents the first thematic review of the literature on the ethical issues concerning digital well-being. The term ‘digital well-being’ is used to refer to the impact of digital technologies on what it means to live a life that is good for a human being. The review explores the existing literature on the ethics of digital well-being, with the goal of mapping the current debate and identifying open questions for future research. The review identifies major issues related to several (...) key social domains: healthcare, education, governance and social development, and media and entertainment. It also highlights three broader themes: positive computing, personalised human–computer interaction, and autonomy and self-determination. The review argues that three themes will be central to ongoing discussions and research by showing how they can be used to identify open questions related to the ethics of digital well-being. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the analytic tradition have recently sought to explore the question of the meaning of life. In the first part of this paper I subject two important approaches from this tradition – those of John Cottingham and Susan Wolf - to criticism. I then suggest that Cottingham and Wolf articulate certain assumptions about the meaning of life that are widely shared amongst analytic philosophers. I go on to subject those assumptions to criticism and seek to develop an alternative (...) approach to the question, one that is largely overlooked in the contemporary literature. (shrink)

This is a draft of a talk I have given at several venues. At one point I planned to revise it for inclusion in the Oxford Handbook I co-edited, but for various reasons I decided against that. Since I still think it contains some useful material, I have uploaded it here. Feedback welcome.

A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special (...) sort of artifact, where artifacts are mind-dependent yet nevertheless can carve at the joints of reality. In particular, I argue that the properties of being a reason and being valuable for are grounded in attitudes yet are still absolutely structural. (shrink)

Zunächst werden die Kernthesen von Habermas' Diskursethik vorgestellt, insbesondere der Universalisierungsgrundsatz U und das diskursethische Prinzip D. Eine ausführliche Analyse zeigt dann, daß Habermas' Argumentationen für diese Prinzipien in mehrfacher Hinsicht ungültig sind. Die Betrachtung früherer Varianten dieser Argumentationen und späterer Kommentare Habermas' macht zudem eine gewisse Wendung Habermas' weg von der Transzendentalpragmatik hin zum Intuitionismus und eine Abschwächung seines Begründungsanspruchs bis hin zu dessen Annullierung deutlich. Eine Kritik an vier Interpretationen von U selbst und an den beiden Hauptinterpretationen von (...) D erweist diese Moralkriterien als in vielerlei Hinsicht unbrauchbar und als bloß formelhafte Vereinigung schwer zu vereinender Ideale. (shrink)

What does Wittgenstein say about the learning child? In the Philosophical Investigations, he writes, ‘An important part … will consist in the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word.’ Here Wittgenstein is describing what is called ‘joint attention’ which is agreed to be a rich resource for learning in children. In this essay, I explore the developmental significance of this passage particularly with regards the learning that occurs in (...) the pre-linguistic child during joint attention. I refer to critical remarks elsewhere in the PI which can help further convey what Wittgenstein means when he talks about attentional capacities and how they develop, including the relevant ability for responsiveness required for the learning to proceed. These considerations should motivate a defence of the social initiation model of learning contra Luntley’s mentalist-individualist account, this despite conceding that certain prior capacities do play a role, though not a central one since these do not pick out the relevant ability (responsiveness) required for learning to take place in the child. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.

This paper critically evaluates institution reconstructing critique—the central methodological strategy employed by Axel Honneth in his latest book Freedom’s Right designed to articulate and justify the normative standards employed by a critical theory of the present. It begins by considering, at a general level, the promises and limits of three ideal-typical normative methodologies of social critique: first principles critique, intuition refining critique, and institution reconstructing critique. It then turns to the details of Honneth’s history and diagnosis of market spheres of (...) society as one key example of institution reconstruction critique. This leads to a consideration of some challenges facing this kind of critique, paying particular attention to problems posed by alternative reconstructions of the same data. It argues, in particular, that there is a troubling indeterminacy in this reconstruction, since alternative teleologies yield substantively different normative analyses of capitalism, and hence substantively different social critiques. In conclusion, the paper suggests some methodological remedies which might need to be adopted in order to make good on the promise of institution reconstructing critique while avoiding some of its most challenging problems. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame these interactions (...) as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate in detail one theoretical approach to the symptom of thought insertion. This approach suggests that patients are lead to disown certain thoughts they are subjected to because they lack a sense of active participation in the occurrence of those thoughts. I examine one reading of this claim, according to which the patients’ anomalous experiences arise from a breakdown of cognitive mechanisms tracking the production of occurrent thoughts, before sketching an alternative reading, according to which their (...) experiences have to be explained in terms of a withdrawal, on the part of the patients themselves, from certain forms of active engagement in reasoning. I conclude with a discussion of the relationship between this view and the idea that patients’ reports of thought insertion reflect a situation in which the boundaries between the self and the world have become uncertain. (shrink)

Many questions about wellbeing involve metaphysical dependence. Does wellbeing depend on minds? Is wellbeing determined by distinct sorts of things? Is it determined differently for different subjects? However, we should distinguish two axes of dependence. First, there are the grounds that generate value. Second, there are the connections between the grounds and value which make it so that those grounds generate that value. Given these distinct axes of dependence, there are distinct dimensions to questions about the dependence of wellbeing. In (...) this paper, I offer a view of wellbeing that gives different answers with respect to these different dimensions. The view is subjectivist about connections but objectivist about grounds. Pluralist about grounds but monist about connections. Invariabilist about connections but variabilist about grounds. Thus, the view offers a simple account that captures the complexity of wellbeing. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions concerning ectogestation are trending. And given that the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992), questions regarding the moral and legal status of abortion in light of the advent of ectogestation will likely continue to be of central importance in the coming years. If ectogestation can intersect with or even determine abortion policy in the future, then a new philosophical analysis of the legal status of abortion is both (...) warranted and urgently needed. I argue that, even if there is no ‘moral’ right to fetal destruction once ectogestation becomes a reality, societies ought not to implement legal prohibitions on a pregnant person’s ability to safely obtain an abortion that results in fetal death because such laws are systemically misogynistic. (shrink)

In their 2013 study of traumatic flashback formation, Bourne, Mackay and Holmes raise the question of whether the propensity of a traumatic experience to produce flashbacks is determined by the emotions that are felt at the time of that experience. They suggest that it is not, but the grounds on which they make this suggestion are flawed. Further research is required. That research will need to overcome a significant methodological difficulty — one which is hard to avoid when fMRI data (...) and introspective reports are combined in a single causal inference. (shrink)

A person possesses value from various components of wellbeing, but they also have overall wellbeing from various instances of value taken together. Most ethicists assume that there is an objectively unique way that wellbeing from components aggregates into overall wellbeing. However, I argue that aggregation is subjective and varies depending on what sort of aggregation a person values. I end with some implications for the significance of death.

This article develops an argument in defense of the claim that Aquinas holds that there are some kinds of activities which can be performed only by persons. In particular, it is argued that Aquinas holds that only persons can engage in the activities proper to a rational nature, e.g., the activities of intellect and will. Next, the article turns to discuss two implications of this thesis concerning Aquinas’s concept of a person. First, the thesis can be used to resolve a (...) prominent scholarly debate concerning Aquinas’s views on the possibility of human persons surviving their bodily deaths. Second, it also points to a problem with a leading interpretation of Aquinas’ account of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Finally, the article concludes by discussing how a correct interpretation of Aquinas’s views on these matters is related to a broader scholarly debate concerning the history of the Western concept of a person. (shrink)

When evaluating theories of causation, intuitions should not play a decisive role, not even intuitions in flawlessly-designed thought experiments. Indeed, no coherent theory of causation can respect the typical person’s intuitions in redundancy (pre-emption) thought experiments, without disrespecting their intuitions in threat-and-saviour (switching/short-circuit) thought experiments. I provide a deductively sound argument for these claims. Amazingly, this argument assumes absolutely nothing about the nature of causation. I also provide a second argument, whose conclusion is even stronger: the typical person’s causal intuitions (...) are thoroughly unreliable. This argument proceeds by raising the neglected question: in what respects is information about intermediate and enabling variables relevant to reliable causal judgment? (shrink)

Let serious propositional contingentism (SPC) be the package of views which consists in (i) the thesis that propositions expressed by sentences featuring terms depend, for their existence, on the existence of the referents of those terms, (ii) serious actualism—the view that it is impossible for an object to exemplify a property and not exist—and (iii) contingentism—the view that it is at least possible that some thing might not have been something. SPC is popular and compelling. But what should we say (...) about possible worlds, if we accept SPC? Here, I first show that a natural view of possible worlds, well-represented in the literature, in conjunction with SPC is inadequate. Though I note various alternative ways of thinking about possible worlds in response to the first problem, I then outline a second more general problem—a master argument—which generally shows that any account of possible worlds meeting very minimal requirements will be inconsistent with compelling claims about mere possibilia which the serious propositional contingentist should accept. (shrink)

In recent work, Adlam (2022b), Chen & Goldstein (2022), and Meacham (2023) have defended accounts of laws that take laws to be primitive global constraints. A major advantage of these accounts is that they’re able to accommodate the many different kinds of laws that appear in physical theories. In this paper I’ll present these three accounts, highlight their distinguishing features, and note some key differences that might lead one to favor one of these accounts over the others. I’ll conclude by (...) briefly discussing a version of a “constraint” account that I think is especially attractive. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to develop precise epistemic rules for good public political arguments, by which political measures in the broad sense are justified. By means of a theory of deliberative democracy, it is substantiated that the justification of a political measure consists in showing argumentatively that this measure most promotes the common good or is morally optimal. It is then discussed which argumentation-theoretical approaches are suitable for providing epistemically sound rules for arguments for such theses and for (...) the associated premises, rules whose compliance implies the truth or acceptability of the thesis. Finally, on the basis of the most suitable approach, namely the epistemological one, such systems of rules for the required types of arguments are presented that fulfil the conditions mentioned. (shrink)

The use of highly abstract mathematical frameworks is essential for building the sort of theoretical foundation for semantic integration needed to bring it to the level of a genuine engineering discipline. At the same time, much of the work that has been done by means of these frameworks assumes a certain amount of background knowledge in mathematics that a lot of people working in ontology, even at a fairly high theoretical level, lack. The major purpose of this short paper is (...) provide a (comparatively) simple model of semantic integration that remains within the friendlier confines of first-order languages and their usual classical semantics and logic. (shrink)

This article discusses Harvey Siegel’s general justification of the epistemological theory of argumentation in his seminal essay “Arguing with Arguments." On the one hand, the achievements of this essay are honoured—in particular, a thorough differentiation of the different meanings of ‘argument’ and ‘argumentation,’ the semantic justification of the fundamentality of arguments as sequences of propositions, and the detailed critiques of alternative theories of argumentation. On the other hand, suggestions for strengthening the theory are added to Siegel's expositions, which make different (...) perspectives within the epistemological theory of argumentation recognisable. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

I examine some recent claims put forward by L. A. Paul, Barry Dainton and Simon Prosser, to the effect that perceptual experiences of movement and change involve an (apparent) experience of ‘passage’, in the sense at issue in debates about the metaphysics of time. Paul, Dainton and Prosser all argue that this supposed feature of perceptual experience – call it a phenomenology of passage – is illusory, thereby defending the view that there is no such a thing as passage, conceived (...) of as a feature of mind-independent reality. I suggest that in fact there is no such phenomenology of passage in the first place. There is, however, a specific structural aspect of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of movement and change that can explain how one might mistakenly come to the belief that such experiences do involve a phenomenology of passage. (shrink)

Bis vor kurzem wurden die Namen Alfred North Whitehead und Bertrand Russell zumeist in einem Atemzug genannt. Im Anschluss an die gemeinsam verfassten Principia Mathematica gingen beide jedoch dezidiert eigene philosophische Wege. Wahrend Russell maageblich zur Entstehung der analytischen Philosophie beitrug, markiert Whiteheads spate Philosophie den Beginn der bis heute virulenten prozessmetaphysischen Tradition. Stand Whitehead dabei lange im Schatten seines langjahrigen Freundes und Kollegen, zeichnet sich spatestens seit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts ein bemerkenswerter Umschwung ab. Der vorliegende Band nimmt die (...) Entwicklung zum Anlass, um Gemeinsamkeiten und Differenzen der beiden Klassiker der angelsachsischen Philosophie neu zu sondieren. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they (...) believe are the most important open questions and ethical issues for the multi-disciplinary study of digital well-being. We also introduce and discuss several themes that we believe will be fundamental to the ongoing study of digital well-being: digital gratitude, automated interventions, and sustainable co-well-being. (shrink)

This paper examines two mistakes regarding David Lewis’ Principal Principle that have appeared in the recent literature. These particular mistakes are worth looking at for several reasons: The thoughts that lead to these mistakes are natural ones, the principles that result from these mistakes are untenable, and these mistakes have led to significant misconceptions regarding the role of admissibility and time. After correcting these mistakes, the paper discusses the correct roles of time and admissibility. With these results in hand, the (...) paper concludes by showing that one way of formulating the chance–credence relation has a distinct advantage over its rivals. (shrink)

Theorists of public reason such as John Rawls often idealize constitutional courts as exemplars of public reason. This paper raises questions about the seduction and limits of analogies between theorists’ account of public reason and actual constitutional jurisprudence. Examining the work product of the United States Supreme Court, the paper argues that while it does engage in reason-giving to support its decisions—as the public reason strategy suggests— those reasons are (largely) legalistic and specifically juristic reasons—not the theorists’ idealized moral-political reasons (...) on matters of fundamental principle. But if constitutional courts do not engage on matters of fundamental principle, then a public reason strategy for assuaging democratic worries about judicial review would no longer be open: prominent liberal and deliberative democratic theorists could no longer point to the alleged superiority of constitutional courts to speak in the name of, and for, the people’s shared political principles. The paper extends beyond the U.S. case study by pointing to three institutional factors explaining the disanalogy between what some constitutional courts do and what public reason theories require them to do. It concludes with considerations about whether the public reason strategy might be more successfully applied to international courts. (shrink)

A phenomenological turn has occurred in contemporary philosophy of mind. Some philosophers working on the nature of intentionality and consciousness have turned away from views that construe the basic ingredients of intentionality in terms of naturalistic tracking relations that hold between thinkers and external conditions in their environment in favor of what has been called the “Phenomenal Intentionality Theory” (PIT). According to PIT, all “original” intentionality is either identical to or partly grounded in phenomenal consciousness. A central claim for PIT (...) is the inseparatism thesis, which asserts that the phenomenal and the intentional are inseparable. In this article, I will situate this thesis within a methodological context I call “analytic phenomenology” and then show why proponents of PIT should take seriously our phenomenology of temporal experience. But I am not aiming to disprove PIT or defend it against views of intentionality that reject inseparatism. Rather, I want to understand what PIT says and how to approach the view, assuming that our goal is to test the theory using the assumptions and methods endorsed by proponents of the theory. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

This paper examines the debate between permissive and impermissive forms of Bayesianism. It briefly discusses some considerations that might be offered by both sides of the debate, and then replies to some new arguments in favor of impermissivism offered by Roger White. First, it argues that White’s (Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 3. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–186, 2010) defense of Indifference Principles is unsuccessful. Second, it contends that White’s (Philos Perspect 19:445–459, 2005) arguments against permissive views do not (...) succeed. (shrink)

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

In “Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding”, Arntzenius et al. (Mind 113:251–283, 2004 ) present cases in which agents who cannot bind themselves are driven by standard decision theory to choose sequences of actions with disastrous consequences. They defend standard decision theory by arguing that if a decision rule leads agents to disaster only when they cannot bind themselves, this should not be taken to be a mark against the decision rule. I show that this claim has surprising implications for a (...) number of other debates in decision theory. I then assess the plausibility of this claim, and suggest that it should be rejected. (shrink)

An adequate account of laws should satisfy at least five desiderata: it should provide a unified account of laws and chances, it should yield plausible relations between laws and chances, it should vindicate numerical chance assignments, it should accommodate dynamical and non-dynamical chances, and it should accommodate a plausible range of nomic possibilities. No extant account of laws satisfies these desiderata. This paper presents a non-Humean account of laws, the Nomic Likelihood Account, that does.

Representation theorems are often taken to provide the foundations for decision theory. First, they are taken to characterize degrees of belief and utilities. Second, they are taken to justify two fundamental rules of rationality: that we should have probabilistic degrees of belief and that we should act as expected utility maximizers. We argue that representation theorems cannot serve either of these foundational purposes, and that recent attempts to defend the foundational importance of representation theorems are unsuccessful. As a result, we (...) should reject these claims, and lay the foundations of decision theory on firmer ground. (shrink)

The paper argues that an account of understanding should take the form of a Carnapian explication and acknowledge that understanding comes in degrees. An explication of objectual understanding is defended, which helps to make sense of the cognitive achievements and goals of science. The explication combines a necessary condition with three evaluative dimensions: An epistemic agent understands a subject matter by means of a theory only if the agent commits herself sufficiently to the theory of the subject matter, and to (...) the degree that the agent grasps the theory (i.e., is able to make use of it), the theory answers to the facts and the agent’s commitment to the theory is justified. The threshold for outright attributions of understanding is determined contextually. The explication has descriptive as well as normative facets and allows for the possibility of understanding by means of non-explanatory (e.g., purely classificatory) theories. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

The central argument of this article is that the standard conception of character given in virtue theory, as exemplified in the work of Rosalind Hursthouse, is seriously flawed. Partially, this is because looking behind a moral action for a ‘character’ is suspiciously akin to looking behind an object for an ‘essence’, and is susceptible to the same interpretive errors as an epistemic strategy. Alternately, a character—once inducted and projected upon a moral agent—is supposed to be a more or less permanent (...) property of that individual; a schema which leaves little room for the real possibility of personal transformation. I argue here that what is often referred to in virtue literature as ‘character’ can be productively re-described as the aggregate of all moral actions performed by any one moral agent: nothing more, and nothing less. My hope is that this interpretive strategy will result in broader and more coherent readings of moral actions, and thus also clarify moral confusion resulting from the current lack of the same. (shrink)

Political epistemology is the intersection of political philosophy and epistemology. This paper develops a political 'hinge' epistemology. Political hinge epistemology draws on the idea that all belief systems have fundamental presuppositions which play a role in the determination of reasons for belief and other attitudes. It uses this core idea to understand and tackle political epistemological challenges, like political disagreement, polarization, political testimony, political belief, ideology, and biases, among other possibilities. I respond to two challenges facing the development of a (...) political hinge epistemology. The first is about nature and demarcation of political hinges, while the second is about rational deliberation over political hinges. I then use political hinge epistemology to analyze ideology, dealing with the challenge of how an agent's ideology 'masks' or distorts their understanding of social reality, along with the challenge of how ideology critique can change the beliefs of agents who adhere to dominant ideologies, if agents only have their own or the competing ideology to rely on (see Haslanger 2017). I then explore how political hinge epistemology might be extended to further our understanding of political belief polarization. (shrink)

Ectogestation involves the gestation of a fetus in an ex utero environment. The possibility of this technology raises a significant question for the abortion debate: Does a woman’s right to end her pregnancy entail that she has a right to the death of the fetus when ectogestation is possible? Some have argued that it does not Mathison & Davis. Others claim that, while a woman alone does not possess an individual right to the death of the fetus, the genetic parents (...) have a collective right to its death Räsänen. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of ectogestation will radically transform the problem of abortion. The argument that I defend purports to show that, even if it is not a person, there is no right to the death of a fetus that could be safely removed from a human womb and gestated in an artificial womb, because there are competent people who are willing to care for and raise the fetus as it grows into a person. Thus, given the possibility of ectogestation, the moral status of the fetus plays no substantial role in determining whether there is a right to its death. (shrink)