In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Computers may help us to better understand (not just verify) arguments. In this article we defend this claim by showcasing the application of a new, computer-assisted interpretive method to an exemplary natural-language ar- gument with strong ties to metaphysics and religion: E. J. Lowe’s modern variant of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Our new method, which we call computational hermeneutics, has been particularly conceived for use in interactive-automated proof assistants. It aims at shedding light on the (...) meanings of words and sentences by framing their inferential role in a given argument. By employing automated theorem reasoning technology within interactive proof assistants, we are able to drastically reduce (by several orders of magnitude) the time needed to test the logical validity of an argu- ment’s formalization. As a result, a new approach to logical analysis, inspired by Donald Davidson’s account of radical interpretation, has been enabled. In computational hermeneutics, the utilization of automated reasoning tools ef- fectively boosts our capacity to expose the assumptions we indirectly commit ourselves to every time we engage in rational argumentation and it fosters the explicitation and revision of our concepts and commitments. (shrink)

Matters of Certainty and Conviction. In the section on certainty, Shaw puts forth a proof of the external world, and considers topics such as change, difference, time, consciousness, substance and quality.

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or pre-reflective “sense of agency”. However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. (...) In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, have been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people’s causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding. (shrink)

What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research topics (...) that span across 82 years. We also tracked their evolution and fluctuating significance over time in the journal articles. Our results concur with and document known and lesser-known episodes of the philosophy of science, including the rise and fall of logic and language-related topics, the relative stability of a metaphysical and ontological questioning (space and time, causation, natural kinds, realism), the significance of epistemological issues about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as the rise of a recent philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses exemplify how computational text-mining methods can be used to provide an empirical large-scale and data-driven perspective on the history of philosophy of science that is complementary to other current historical approaches. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Suppose that two competing norms, N1 and N2, can be identified such that a given person’s response can be interpreted as correct according to N1 but incorrect according to N2. Which of these two norms, if any, should one use to interpret such a response? In this paper we seek to address this fundamental problem by studying individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their case judgments and reflective attitudes. To investigate (...) the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task. As a case study, we identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals (N1) versus Inferentialism (N2) and investigate to what extent internally consistent competence models can be reconstructed for the participants on this basis. After extensive empirical investigations, an apparent reasoning error with and-to-if inferences was found in one of these two groups. The implications of this case study for debates on the proper role of normative considerations in psychology are discussed. (shrink)

Sacrificial dilemmas such as the trolley problem play an important role in experimental philosophy (x-phi). But it is increasingly argued that, since we are not likely to encounter runaway trolleys in our daily life, the usefulness of such thought experiments for understanding moral judgments in more ecologically valid contexts may be limited. However, similar sacrificial dilemmas are experienced in real life by animal research decision makers. As part of their job, they must make decisions about the suffering, and often the (...) death, of many non-human animals. For this reason, a context-specific investigation of so-called “3R dilemmas” (i.e., dilemmas where there is a conflict between the principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement of the use of animals in research) is essential to improve the situation of both non-human animals and human stakeholders. An approach well suited for such investigation is experimental philosophical bioethics (“bioxphi”), which draws on methods similar to x-phi to probe more realistic, practical scenarios with an eye to informing normative debates and ethical policy. In this article, we argue for a need to investigate 3R dilemmas among professional decision-makers using the tools of bioxphi. In a first step, we define 3R dilemmas and discuss previous investigations of professionals’ attitudes in such cases. In a second step, we show how bioxphi is a promising method to investigate the whys and hows of professional decision-making in 3R dilemmas. In a last step, we provide a bioxphi template for 3R dilemmas, give recommendations on its use, explore the normative relevance of data collected by such means, and discuss important limitations. (shrink)

In this study we investigate the influence of reason-relation readings of indicative conditionals and ‘and’/‘but’/‘therefore’ sentences on various cognitive assessments. According to the Frege-Grice tradition, a dissociation is expected. Specifically, differences in the reason-relation reading of these sentences should affect participants’ evaluations of their acceptability but not of their truth value. In two experiments we tested this assumption by introducing a relevance manipulation into the truth-table task as well as in other tasks assessing the participants’ acceptability and probability evaluations. Across (...) the two experiments a strong dissociation was found. The reason-relation reading of all four sentences strongly affected their probability and acceptability evaluations, but hardly affected their respective truth evaluations. Implications of this result for recent work on indicative conditionals are discussed. (shrink)

Families play an essential role in deceased organ procurement. As the person cannot directly communicate his or her wishes regarding donation, the family is often the only source of information regarding consent or refusal. We provide a systematic description and analysis of the different roles the family can play, and actions the family can take, in the organ procurement process across different jurisdictions and consent systems. First, families can inform or update healthcare professionals about a person’s donation wishes. Second, families (...) can authorize organ procurement in the absence of deceased’s preferences and the default is not to remove organs, and oppose donation where there is no evidence of preference but the default is to presume consent; in both cases, the decision could be based on their own wishes or what they think the deceased would have wanted. Finally, families can overrule the known wishes of the deceased, which can mean preventing donation, or permitting donation when the deceased refused it. We propose a schema of 4 levels on which to map these possible family roles: no role, witness, surrogate, and full decisional authority. We conclude by mapping different jurisdictions onto this schema to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the consent system for organ donation and some important nuances about the role of families. This classificatory model aims to account for the majority of the world’s consent systems. It provides conceptual and methodological guidance that can be useful to researchers, professionals, and policymakers involved in organ procurement. (shrink)

This World Bank Report offers a new conception of fair decision processes in health financing. It argues that such procedural fairness can contribute to fairer outcomes, strengthen the legitimacy of decision processes, build trust in authorities, and promote the sustainability of reforms on the path to health coverage for all.

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

In this manuscript we study individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their behavioral responses and reflective attitudes. To investigate the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task, and a Bayesian mixture model tailored to analyze the data. The goal is thereby to identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals and Inferentialism and to investigate their performance on the uncertain and-to-if inference task.

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

In Beyond Physicalism, an interdisciplinary group of physical scientists, behavioral and social scientists, and humanists from the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research argue that physicalism must be replaced by an expanded scientific naturalism that accommodates something spiritual at the heart of nature.

This paper examines three accounts of the sleeping beauty case: an account proposed by Adam Elga, an account proposed by David Lewis, and a third account defended in this paper. It provides two reasons for preferring the third account. First, this account does a good job of capturing the temporal continuity of our beliefs, while the accounts favored by Elga and Lewis do not. Second, Elga’s and Lewis’ treatments of the sleeping beauty case lead to highly counterintuitive consequences. The (...) proposed account also leads to counterintuitive consequences, but they’re not as bad as those of Elga’s account, and no worse than those of Lewis’ account. (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)

I argue that the theory of chance proposed by David Lewis has three problems: (i) it is time asymmetric in a manner incompatible with some of the chance theories of physics, (ii) it is incompatible with statistical mechanical chances, and (iii) the content of Lewis's Principal Principle depends on how admissibility is cashed out, but there is no agreement as to what admissible evidence should be. I proposes two modifications of Lewis's theory which resolve these difficulties. I conclude by (...) tentatively proposing a third modification of Lewis's theory, one which explains many of the common features shared by the chance theories of physics. (shrink)

A review of David Rodin's Book, War and Self-Defense.

This paper takes up David Kaplan's suggestion that the phenomenon of cognitive dynamics can be approached via a study of what it takes for someone to change her mind. It is argued that in order for a subject to be able to change her mind about something, there must be occasions on which the following is the case: (1) First, the subject believed of an 'x' that it was f, now she believes of 'x' that it is not-f. (2) (...) She stopped believing of 'x' that it was f before she started believing of 'x' that it was not-f. (3) She knows that (1) and (2). The first part of the investigation shows why (1) - (3) are necessary within an account of what it is for someone to change her mind. The second part focuses on condition (3) and argues that it entails that the sameness or difference of thought content over time must sometimes be an epistemic given, i.e., that the subject can know that a thought she entertains now is the same as a thought she entertained earlier. (shrink)

This paper will address Foucault’s analysis of the Hebrew and Christian pastor and argue that Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power in Security, Territory, Population neglects an important characteristic of the shepherd/pastor figure: violence. Despite Foucault’s close analysis of the early development of the Hebrew pastor, he overlooks the role of violence and instead focuses on sacrifice. However the sacrificial pastor does not figure in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew pastor is called to lead, feed and protect the flock, not sacrifice (...) for them. This is not to suggest that the theme of sacrifice is absent in the Hebrew Scriptures but that sacrifice is not a role attributed to the pastor until Jesus’ reinterpretation of the “good shepherd” in Chapter 10 of The Gospel of John.4 In distinguishing the Hebrew and Christian formulations of the pastor, the roles of violence and sacrifice in each can be understood more clearly. Beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures I will demonstrate the importance of violence in the figure of David as the first “shepherd of men”. I will argue that violence and the ability to protect the flock was a significant and determining characteristic of the Hebrew pastor. Contrary to Foucault’s assertion I will demonstrate that sacrifice was not a role attributed to the Hebrew pastor. While the words and life of Jesus provide a new sacrificial paradigm for understanding the “shepherd of men,” it is Paul who provides the foundation on which the practice of the Christian pastor is established in the Church. Therefore I will examine the writing of Paul to demonstrate the way violence operates in the Christian pastorate. I will argue that sacrifice does not replace violence but violence is subsumed in the sacrificial pastor and continues to operate. Finally I will suggest that the introduction of violence into Foucault’s analysis establishes a deeper connection between pastoral power and biopower. Thus, this connection engenders a richer understanding of the tension in Foucault’s work between care and violence in the poles of biopower: to make live and let die. (shrink)

One popular approach to statistical mechanics understands statistical mechanical probabilities as measures of rational indifference. Naive formulations of this ``indifference approach'' face reversibility worries - while they yield the right prescriptions regarding future events, they yield the wrong prescriptions regarding past events. This paper begins by showing how the indifference approach can overcome the standard reversibility worries by appealing to the Past Hypothesis. But, the paper argues, positing a Past Hypothesis doesn't free the indifference approach from all reversibility worries. For (...) while appealing to the Past Hypothesis allows it to escape one kind of reversibility worry, it makes it susceptible to another - the Meta-Reversibility Objection. And there is no easy way for the indifference approach to escape the Meta-Reversibility Objection. As a result, reversibility worries pose a steep challenge to the viability of the indifference approach. (shrink)

Several variants of Lewis's Best System Account of Lawhood have been proposed that avoid its commitment to perfectly natural properties. There has been little discussion of the relative merits of these proposals, and little discussion of how one might extend this strategy to provide natural property-free variants of Lewis's other accounts, such as his accounts of duplication, intrinsicality, causation, counterfactuals, and reference. We undertake these projects in this paper. We begin by providing a framework for classifying and assessing the variants (...) of the Best System Account. We then evaluate these proposals, and identify the most promising candidates. We go on to develop a proposal for systematically modifying Lewis's other accounts so that they, too, avoid commitment to perfectly natural properties. We conclude by briefly considering a different route one might take to developing natural property-free versions of Lewis's other accounts, drawing on recent work by Williams. (shrink)

Book review of Danks, D. (2014) Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models.

Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith were published from 2004 to 2007. The new atheism was widely spread by these books. Compared to other atheisms, the particularity of this movement is rooted in its motivations, which are in a sense mostly cultural and political, rather than strictly circumscribed to philosophical issues. The goal of this note is to characterize the new atheism through (...) the arguments given by the four referred books. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

Epistemic nihilism for inquiry is the claim that there are no epistemic norms of inquiry. Epistemic nihilism was once the received stance towards inquiry, and I argue that it should be taken seriously again. My argument is that the same considerations which led us away from epistemic nihilism in the case of belief not only cannot refute epistemic nihilism for inquiry, but in fact may well support it. These include the argument from non-existence that there are no non-epistemic reasons for (...) belief; the linguistic argument that epistemic norms of belief are needed to capture the semantics of ordinary epistemic talk; and the argument from theoretical roles that epistemic norms are needed to play key theoretical roles for rational belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative Gibbardian picture on which norms of inquiry are all-things-considered norms governing action. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

We argue that S is in a position to know that p iff S can know that p. Thus, what makes position-to-know-ascriptions true is just a special case of what makes ability-ascriptions true: compossibility. The novelty of our compossibility theory of epistemic modality lies in its subsuming epistemic modality under agentive modality, the modality characterizing what agents can do.

I discuss the relevance of the current predicament in cosmology to the debate over scientific realism. I argue that the existence of two, empirically successful but ontologically inconsistent cosmological theories presents difficulties for the realist position.

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

According to orthodoxy, our best physical theories strongly support Eternalism over Presentism. Our goal is to argue against this consensus, by arguing that a certain overlooked aspect of our best physical theories strongly supports Presentism over Eternalism.

Shepherd appears to endorse something like the following biconditonal regarding qualities and objects. □(An object, O, exists ↔ Some bundle of qualities, Q1, Q2, … Qn exists). There is a growing consensus in the secondary literature that she also takes the right side of this biconditional to ground the left side. I.e. Shepherd is a bundle theorist who takes an object to be nothing but a mass of qualities, or causal powers. I argue here that despite appearances, this interpretation reverses (...) Shepherd's actual view. I.e. I argue that for Shepherd qualities, or causal powers, are grounded in the intrinsic constitutions of objects. In the case of "external objects", these intrinsic constitutions are unknowable to us; in the case of "internal objects", we have direct knowledge of them. (shrink)

Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion (...) is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the resulting epistemic position of the audience. (shrink)

The growing concentration of wealth has acquired a new urgency in recent years. One particular view in this context is developed by Ingrid Robeyns in her ground-breaking work on limitarianism. According to this view, no one should have more than a certain amount of valuable goods, such as income and wealth. The contributors to this symposium, Brian Berkey, David Axelsen and Lasse Nielsen, Jessica Flanigan and Christopher Freiman, and Lena Halldenius, critically examine various aspects of limitarianism. In particular, (...) they examine how limitarianism should be interpreted and developed as a principle of justice, on what reasons speak in favour and against limitarianism, and on how limitarianism relates to other principles of distributive justice. Our hope is that this symposium will contribute to the ongoing debate in political philosophy about the concentration of wealth and economic justice. (shrink)

Identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for individuating and classifying diseases is a matter of great importance in the fields of law, ethics, epidemiology, and of course, medicine. In this paper, I first propose a means of achieving this goal, ensuring that no two distinct disease-types could correctly be ascribed to the same disease-token. I then posit a metaphysical ontology of diseases—that is, I give an account of what a disease is. This is essential to providing the most effective means (...) of interfering with disease processes. Following existing work in the philosophy of medicine and epidemiology (primarily Christopher Boorse; Caroline Whitbeck; Alexander Broadbent), philosophy of biology (Joseph LaPorte; D.L. Hull), conditional analyses of causation (J.L. Mackie; David Lewis), and recent literature on dispositional essentialism (Stephen Mumford and Rani Anjum; Alexander Bird), I endorse a dispositional conception of disease. Following discussion of various conceptions of disease-identity, their relations to the clinical and pathological effects of the diseases in question, and how diseases are treated, I conclude (i) that diseases should be individuated by their causes, and (ii) that diseases are causal processes best seen as simultaneously acting sequences of mutually manifesting dispositions. (shrink)

Since the 18th century, one of the key features of diagnosed psychopaths has been “moral colorblindness” or an inability to form moral judgments. However, attempts at experimentally verifying this moral incapacity have been largely unsuccessful. After reviewing the centrality of “moral colorblindness” to the study and diagnosis of psychopathy, I argue that the reason that researchers have been unable to verify that diagnosed psychopaths have an inability to make moral judgments is because their research is premised on the assumption that (...) there is a specific moral faculty of the brain, or specific “moral” emotions, and that this faculty or set of emotions can become “impaired”. I review recent research and argue that we have good reason to think that there is no such distinct capacity for moral judgment, and that, as a result, it is impossible for someone’s “moral judgment faculty” to become selectively disabled. I then discuss the implications of such a position on psychopathy research, the coherence of the disorder, and the moral responsibility of psychopaths. (shrink)

This paper overviews the current status of debates on tracking representationalism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is a matter of tracking features of one's environment in a certain way. We overview the main arguments for the view and the main objections and challenges it faces. We close with a discussion of alternative versions of representationalism that might overcome the shortcomings of tracking representationalism.

In this paper I consider whether a powers ontology facilitates a reduction of causal relations to intrinsic powers of the causal relata. I first argue that there is a tension in the view that powerful causation is an internal relation in this sense. Powers are ontologically dependent on other powers for their individuation, but in that case—given an Aristotelian conception of properties as immanent universals—powers will not be intrinsic on several extant analyses of ‘intrinsic’, since to possess a given power (...) P requires the existence of other concrete particulars as bearers of the powers that individuate P. I suggest several ways for Aristotelians to resolve this tension, but all tenable options involve individuative type-level causal relations between powers. While these individuative relations between powers are internal in the sense that the powers are essentially related, this is a different sense of ‘ internal ’ to the one that entails reducibility. The proposed reduction of token-causal relations to powers succeeds only at the cost of irreducible type-level causal relations between the powers themselves. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience claims that perception is constituted by bodily interaction with the environment, drawing on practical knowledge of the systematic ways that sensory inputs are disposed to change as a result of movement. Despite the theory’s associations with enactivism, it is sometimes claimed that the appeal to ‘knowledge’ means that the theory is committed to giving an essential theoretical role to internal representation, and therefore to a form of orthodox cognitive science. This paper defends the role (...) ascribed to knowledge by the theory, but argues that this knowledge can and should be identified with bodily skill rather than representation. Making the further argument that the notion of ‘representation hunger’ can be replaced with ‘prima facie representation hunger’, it concludes that although the theory could optionally be developed scientifically in part by reference to internal representation, it makes a strong and natural fit with anti-representationalist embodied or enactive cognitive science. (shrink)

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use (...) in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

Many writers have recently urged that the epistemic rationality of beliefs can depend on broadly pragmatic (as opposed to truth-directed) factors. Taken to an extreme, this line of thought leads to a view on which there is no such thing as a distinctive epistemic form of rationality. A series of papers by Susanna Rinard develops the view that something like our traditional notion of pragmatic rationality is all that is needed to account for the rationality of beliefs. This approach has (...) undeniable attractions. But examining different versions of the approach uncovers problems. The problems help reveal why epistemic rationality is an indispensable part of understanding rationality—not only of beliefs, but of actions. We may or may not end up wanting to make a place, in our theories of epistemic rationality, for factors such as the practical or moral consequences of having beliefs. But a purely pragmatic notion of rationality—one that’s stripped of any component of distinctively epistemic evaluation—cannot do all the work that we need done. (shrink)

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We argue that if these findings are correct, this is plausible reason for doubting that all moral judgments necessarily share common features: if diverse brain processes give rise to what we (...) refer to as “moral judgments”, then we have reason to suspect that these judgments may have different features. After advancing this argument, we show that giving up the unity of moral judgment seems to effectively dissolve the internalism/externalism debate concerning motivation within the field of metaethics. (shrink)

The revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics can be seen as a response to the modern problem of disenchantment, that is, the perceived loss of meaning in modernity. However, in Virtue and Meaning, David McPherson contends that the dominant approach still embraces an overly disenchanted view. In a wide-ranging discussion, McPherson argues for a more fully re-enchanted perspective that gives better recognition to the meanings by which we live and after which we seek, and to the fact that human beings (...) are the meaning-seeking animal. In doing so, he defends distinctive accounts of the relationship between virtue and happiness, other-regarding demands, and the significance of linking neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics with a view of the meaning of life and a spiritual life where contemplation has a central role. This book will be valuable for philosophers and other readers who are interested in virtue ethics and the perennial question of the meaning of life. (shrink)

In a friendly interdisciplinary debate, we interrogate from several vantage points the question of “personhood” in light of contemporary and near-future forms of social AI. David J. Gunkel approaches the matter from a philosophical and legal standpoint, while Jordan Wales offers reflections theological and psychological. Attending to metaphysical, moral, social, and legal understandings of personhood, we ask about the position of apparently personal artificial intelligences in our society and individual lives. Re-examining the “person” and questioning prominent construals of that (...) category, we hope to open new views upon urgent and much-discussed questions that, quite soon, may confront us in our daily lives. (shrink)

Humor is unlike other forms of communication because its content is not meant literally. Like acts of play, humor is not intended to be taken at face value. As a consequence, the assumptions and rules that govern normal conversation do not apply. Humor therefore depends upon both the speaker and the audience fully understanding that what was communicated should be treated in this unique way. The play frame refers to this shared understanding about the nature of the communication. Analyzing whether (...) a communication falls within the play frame may help us better understand not only whether the communication can be deemed non-serious or serious, but also whether it can be treated uniquely as merely the speaker’s attempt at play or as a typical instance of literal speech for which the speaker can be deemed ethically responsible. (shrink)