This essay begins with the assumption that many of our moral disputes have deeper roots in disagreement over worldview propositions. If this is true, and if there is a fact of the matter about worldview propositions, such that one could know the truth of at least some of them, then this makes it possible for one to maintain one’s moral beliefs, even despite the persistent, pervasive disagreements so common today. I argue that this holds true even when those debates include (...) supposed peers and when the worldview propositions themselves are highly disputed. (shrink)

In any field, we might expect different features relevant to its understanding and development to receive attention at different times, depending on the stage of that field’s growth and the interests that occupy theorists and even the history of the theorists themselves. In the relatively young life of argumentation theory, at least as it has formed a body of issues with identified research questions, attention has almost naturally been focused on the central concern of the field—arguments. Focus is also given (...) to the nature of arguers and the position of the evaluator, who is often seen as possessing a “God’s-eye view” (Hamblin 1970). Less attention, however, has been paid in the philosophical literature to the .. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the practice of civil disagreement has robust epistemic benefits and that these benefits enable meaningful forms of reconciliation—across worldview lines and amid the challenging information environment of our age. I then engage two broad groups of objections: either that civil disagreement opposes, rather than promotes, clarity, or else that it does little to help it. If successful, my account gives us reason to include civil disagreement among what Mill calls “the real morality of public (...) discussion,” a fact that should stir us to take more seriously the decline of civility in contemporary life. (shrink)

Plato’s Socrates holds that we always have reason to be just, since being just is essential for living a happy and successful life. In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ main interlocutor, Glaucon, raises a vivid and powerful challenge to this claim. He presents the case of Gyges, a Lydian shepherd who possesses a ring that gives him the power of invisibility. Glaucon’s contention is that Gyges does not have reason to be just in this circumstance, since being just will (...) not promote his happiness. Thus, the argument poses the following challenge: what reason do we have to be just, particularly in circumstances where we can get away with injustice? In this essay, we describe Glaucon’s challenge, highlight its similarity to challenges offered by other skeptical figures in the history of philosophy, namely, Hobbes’ Foole and Hume’s sensible knave, and present three broad lines of response. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Understanding community-level selection using Lewontin’s criteria requires both community-level inheritance and community-level heritability, and in the discipline of community and ecosystem genetics, these are often conflated. While there are existing studies that show the possibility of both, these studies impose community-level inheritance as a product of the experimental design. For this reason, these experiments provide only weak support for the existence of community-level selection in nature. By contrast, treating communities as interactors (in line with Hull’s replicator-interactor framework or Dawkins’s idea (...) of the “extended phenotype”) provides a more plausible and empirically supportable model for the role of ecological communities in the evolutionary process. (shrink)

Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the Semantic Web. This paper provides background on what bio-ontologies are, why they are relevant to botany, and the principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of ontologies and related resources that are relevant to plant science, (...) with a detailed description of the Plant Ontology (PO). We discuss the challenges of building an ontology that covers all green plants (Viridiplantae). Key results: Ontologies can advance plant science in four keys areas: 1. comparative genetics, genomics, phenomics, and development, 2. taxonomy and systematics, 3. semantic applications and 4. education. Conclusions: Bio-ontologies offer a flexible framework for comparative plant biology, based on common botanical understanding. As genomic and phenomic data become available for more species, we anticipate that the annotation of data with ontology terms will become less centralized, while at the same time, the need for cross-species queries will become more common, causing more researchers in plant science to turn to ontologies. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously defended two theses that have fallen rather dramatically out of fashion. The first is that intensions are “creatures of darkness” that ultimately have no place in respectable philosophical circles, owing primarily to their lack of rigorous identity conditions. However, although he was thoroughly familiar with Carnap’s foundational studies in what would become known as possible world semantics, it likely wouldn’t yet have been apparent to Quine that he was fighting a losing battle against intensions, due in (...) large measure to developments stemming from Carnap’s studies and culminating in the work of Kripke, Hintikka, and Bayart. These developments undermined Quine’s crusade against intensions on two fronts. First, in the context of possible world semantics, intensions could after all be given rigorous identity conditions by defining them (in the simplest case) as functions from worlds to appropriate extensions, a fact exploited to powerful and influential effect in logic and linguistics by the likes of Kaplan, Montague, Lewis, and Cresswell. Second, the rise of possible world semantics fueled a strong resurgence of metaphysics in contemporary analytic philosophy that saw properties and propositions widely, fruitfully, and unabashedly adopted as ontological primitives in their own right. This resurgence — happily, in my view — continues into the present day. -/- For a time, at any rate, Quine experienced somewhat better success with his second thesis: that higher-order logic is, at worst, confused and, at best, a quirky notational alternative to standard first-order logic. However, Quine notwithstanding, a great deal of recent work in formal metaphysics transpires in a higher-order logical framework in which properties and propositions fall into an infinite hierarchy of types of (at least) every finite order. Initially, the most philosophically compelling reason for embracing such a framework since Russell first proposed his simple theory of types was simply that it provides a relatively natural explanation of the paradoxes. However, since the seminal work of Prior there has been a growing trend to consider higher-order logic to be the most philosophically natural framework for metaphysical inquiry, many of the contributors to this volume being among the most important and influential advocates of this view. Indeed, this is now quite arguably the dominant view among formal metaphysicians. -/- In this paper, and against the current tide, I will argue in §1 that there are still good reasons to think that Quine’s second battle is not yet lost and that the correct framework for logic is first-order and type-free — properties and propositions, logically speaking, are just individuals among others in a single domain of quantification — and that it arises naturally out of our most basic logical and semantical intuitions. The data I will draw upon are not new and are well-known to contemporary higher-order metaphysicians. However, I will try to defend my thesis in what I believe is a novel way by suggesting that these basic intuitions ground a reasonable distinction between “pure” logic and non-logical theory, and that Russell-style semantic paradoxes of truth and exemplification arise only when we move beyond the purely logical and, hence, do not of themselves provide any strong objection to a type-free conception of properties and propositions. -/- Most of my arguments in §1 are largely independent of any specific account of the nature of properties and propositions beyond their type-freedom. However, I will in addition argue that there are good reasons to take propositions, at least, to be very fine-grained. My arguments are thus bolstered significantly if it can be shown that there are in fact well-defined examples of logics that are not only type-free but which comport with such a conception of propositions. It is the purpose of §2 to lay out a logic of this sort in some detail, drawing especially upon work by George Bealer and related work of my own. With the logic in place, it will be possible to generalize the line of argument noted above regarding Russell-style paradoxes and, in §3, apply it to two propositional paradoxes — the Prior-Kaplan paradox and the Russell-Myhill paradox — that are often taken to threaten the sort of account developed here. (shrink)

One of the reasons why there is no Hegelian school in contemporary ethics in the way that there are Kantian, Humean and Aristotelian schools is because Hegelians have been unable to clearly articulate the Hegelian alternative to those schools’ moral psychologies, i.e., to present a Hegelian model of the motivation to, perception of, and responsibility for moral action. Here it is argued that in its most basic terms Hegel's model can be understood as follows: the agent acts in a responsible (...) and thus paradigmatic sense when she identifies as reasons those motivations which are grounded in his or her talents and support actions that are likely to develop those talents in ways suggested by his or her interests. (shrink)

The article presents Lord Acton’s notion of liberalism and citizenship. Liberalism, as ordinarily understood, treats the individual as the founding stone of civil society and the measure of political order – man and woman and their rights are supreme. In the past, this allowed liberalism to delegitimize society of estates and absolutism, yet it raised the insoluble dilemma of how to reconnect the self‑sufficient individual with the society and the state. Furthermore, social engineering employed in service of equality and individual (...) rights, made liberalism an abstract doctrine, hostile to any tradition and illiberal in its nature. Unlike this doctrinaire liberalism, Actonian liberalism is organic, thriving on national tradition and having only one arbitrary element – higher law that is the yardstick of good and evil. Organic liberalism knows not the contradiction between the individual and the polity. It balances the rights of the individual with the respect for the national tradition, and stresses individual and communal liberty as the ultimate aim of politics. Further, man and woman participate in a multitude of intermediate organizations in which they can truly exercise their citizenship. Organic liberalism, as Acton claims, is a constant element of Western Civilization, even if it achieves its maturity sometime in the seventeenth‑eighteenth century. It then become a characteristic feature of Anglo‑American liberalism. (shrink)

In accordance with Leo Strauss’s ingenious suggestion, the Athenian Stranger of Plato’s Laws is best understood as an alternative ‘Socrates’, fleeing from the hemlock to Crete. Situated between Crito and Phaedo, Laws effectively tests the reader’s loyalty to the real Socrates who obeys Athenian law and dies cheerfully in Athens. Having separated Plato from the Stranger, a nuanced defence of Karl Popper’s suspicions about Laws confronts the apologetic readings of both Strauss and Christopher Bobonich. As hinted by his preference (...) for wine, the antidote for hemlock, the Athenian Stranger repeatedly proves himself the opposite of Socrates, particularly with respect to piety. Once the Stranger is recognized as ‘an unreliable narrator’, this apparently ponderous product of Plato’s senility becomes the taut thriller of an innovative teacher at the peak of his powers. (shrink)

Major Research Paper Abstract -/- A Part of This World: Deleuze & The Logic Of Creation. -/- Is there a particular danger in following Deleuze’s philosophy to its end result? According to Peter Hallward and Alain Badiou, Deleuze’s philosophy has some rather severe conclusions. Deleuze has been known as a vitalist thinker of life and affirmation. Hallward & Badiou seek to challenge the accepted view of Deleuze; showing that these accepted norms in Deleuzian scholarship should be challenged; and that initially (...) Deleuze calls for the evacuation of political action in order to remain firm in the realm of pure contemplation. I intend to investigate and defend Deleuze’s philosophy and against critics like Badiou and Hallward; and that not only is Deleuze’s philosophy creative and vital but also highly revolutionary and ‘a part of this world.’ I will look at several works in Deleuze’s corpus, as well as look at Deleuzian scholars whom defend Deleuze’s position -/- Hallward sees Deleuze as a theophantic thinker of the one and like Spinoza an individual mode must align oneself with the intellectual love of god, so that creativity and expressivity may mediate through them. Thus, according to Hallward the major theme of Deleuze’s philosophy is creativity; and a subject or a creature must tap into this vital spark of creation, which, is also a form of creatural confinement. Hallward states this creative act can only occur in the realm of the virtual, by lines of flight leading 'out of this world'. The subject is then re-introduced to an extra-worldly existence of contemplation and remains further away from decisions and lived experience. Deleuze, according to Hallward, falls prey to a cosmological pantheism. -/- Badiou has similar concerns. Deleuze’s philosophy is too systematic and abstract. The entirety of Deleuzes’ work is surrounded by metaphysics of the one; and essentially its repercussions lead to an overt asceticism. Badiou notes that Deleuze wants us all to surrender thought to a renewed concept of the one. Through the surrender of the one, the multiple is lost and incorporated into the realm of simulacra. Everything in this Deleuzian world is ‘always-already’ in the infinite and inhuman totality of the one. According to Badiou, this entire process is articulated in the power of inorganic life that operates through all of us. Like Hallward, Badiou sees Deleuze demolishing the subject, who is stuck between machinery and exteriority. Subjects are forced to transcend and go beyond their limits, slowly collapsing into an infinite virtuality. Badiou believes this is a powerful metaphor for a philosophy of death. Thus the conditions of Deleuzian thought are contingent upon asceticism, making a Deleuzian world a sort of ‘crowned anarchy’. Badiou sees Deleuze’s ascetic mission intimately linked with a philosophy of death, and like Hallward we should pay careful attention to the outcome of such an aristocratic philosophy. Death according to Badiou, symbolizes Deleuzian thought, not only making it dangerous, but also actualizing it as an ineffective position. Badiou also points out that Deleuze’s conceptual sources are not only limited but also repeated time and time again through a monotonous selection of concepts. Is this a fair critique and representation of Deleuzian thought? -/- Eugene Holland states, that both Hallward and Badiou have misrepresented Deleuze. Deleuze does invoke the creation of a new earth but one which we all fully believe in. The only world Deleuze wants to get out of is the world of habits, conformity, power; and forces that block creative being. According to Holland, Hallward presents us a Deleuze that inhibits an engagement with the world. However Deleuze’s creative enterprise is insistent on forming concepts that can change and transform our world. -/- So the question arises where does the problem of misrepresentation begin? It begins with both Badiou and Hallward having an erroneous account of the actual/virtual distinction in Deleuze’s Philosophy. According to Protevi, Hallward posits a dualism between the actual and the virtual, denying the role of the intensive. Hallward initially sees the relationship between the intensive and the virtual, ignoring the fact that the intensive has its own ontological register that mediates both the virtual and the actual. However, Protevi notes if one could not accept the intensive for an ontological register and had to place it with one or the other; you would have to accept an interrelationship between the actual and the intensive. Hallward places it in the realm of the virtual, thus, leading us to his major claim that Deleuze’s philosophy leads us out of the world. Protevi states, intensive processes happen in our world they are a part of this world. Hallward completely empties all creativity from the actual, thus depending on the virtual and its slippery slope. Both Hallward and Badiou have missed the point altogether. We live in an intensive/actual world and the main point about Deleuze’s politics has to do with experimentation and social interaction and the transformation and intervention of the concept. As Daniel W. Smith states, unlike Badiou, Deleuze is not searching for an axiomatic approach to the world, one that is prone to reductionism but rather with problematic, inventive and creative methods to transform a society. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that it is open to semicompatibilists to maintain that no ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. This is significant for two reasons. First, it undermines Christopher Evan Franklin’s recent claim that everyone thinks that an ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Second, it reveals an important difference between John Martin Fischer’s semicompatibilism and Kadri Vihvelin’s version of classical compatibilism, which shows that the dispute between them (...) is not merely a verbal dispute. Along the way, I give special attention to the notion of general abilities, and, though I defend the distinctiveness of Fischer’s semicompatibilism against the verbal dispute charge, I also use the discussion of the nature of general abilities to argue for the falsity of a certain claim that Fischer and coauthor Mark Ravizza have made about their account. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce famously claimed that ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth’ (W3: 273). Christopher Hookway has argued for a highly distinctive interpretation of this claim in terms of speech-acts and the normative commitments we incur in performing them. So-construed, Peirce’s conception of truth is difficult to compare with standard theories of the concept, which tend to focus instead upon some property or feature that (...) is shared by all and only true propositions, and with whether or not that property is substantive or metaphysically significant. This paper examines Hookway’s interpretation of Peirce’s conception of truth in an effort to clarify its position in logical space. It then raises some difficulties for the way Hookway tries to accommodate Peirce’s remarks about the special status of assertion and belief in science. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway’s work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value. -/- Hookway’s original and extensive studies of Charles S. Peirce have made him among the most admired and frequently referenced of Peirce’s interpreters. His work on classical American pragmatism has explored the philosophies of William (...) James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce, and examined the influence of pragmatist ideas outside of the United States. Additionally, Hookway has participated in a number of celebrated exchanges with some of the most high-profile figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, including Karl-Otto Apel, Philip Pettit, Hilary Putnam, and W.V.O. Quine, through which his treatments of a large range of topics in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and language have been developed and promoted. The chapters in this book—which include contributions from several of Hookway’s former students and colleagues—include studies of Hookway’s engagement with the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey, his contributions to virtue epistemology, and his discussions of hope and pragmatist metaphysics. -/- Pragmatic Reason will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and epistemology. (shrink)

The goal of this short chapter, aimed at philosophers, is to provide an overview and brief explanation of some central concepts involved in predictive processing (PP). Even those who consider themselves experts on the topic may find it helpful to see how the central terms are used in this collection. To keep things simple, we will first informally define a set of features important to predictive processing, supplemented by some short explanations and an alphabetic glossary. -/- The features described here (...) are not shared in all PP accounts. Some may not be necessary for an individual model; others may be contested. Indeed, not even all authors of this collection will accept all of them. To make this transparent, we have encouraged contributors to indicate briefly which of the features are necessary to support the arguments they provide, and which (if any) are incompatible with their account. For the sake of clarity, we provide the complete list here, very roughly ordered by how central we take them to be for “Vanilla PP” (i.e., a formulation of predictive processing that will probably be accepted by most researchers working on this topic). More detailed explanations will be given below. Note that these features do not specify individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of “predictive processing”. All we currently have is a semantic cluster, with perhaps some overlapping sets of jointly sufficient criteria. The framework is still developing, and it is difficult, maybe impossible, to provide theory-neutral explanations of all PP ideas without already introducing strong background assumptions. (shrink)

In apparent motion experiments, participants are presented with what is in fact a succession of two brief stationary stimuli at two different locations, but they report an impression of movement. Philosophers have recently debated whether apparent motion provides evidence in favour of a particular account of the nature of temporal experience. I argue that the existing discussion in this area is premised on a mistaken view of the phenomenology of apparent motion and, as a result, the space of possible philosophical (...) positions has not yet been fully explored. In particular, I argue that the existence of apparent motion is compatible with an account of the nature of temporal experience that involves a version of direct realism. In doing so, I also argue against two other claims often made about apparent motion, viz. that apparent motion is the psychological phenomenon that underlies motion experience in the cinema, and that apparent motion is subjectively indistinguishable from real motion. (shrink)

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)

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)

Should models of consciousness be detailed _mechanistic_ models of particular types of systems, or should they be _minimal_ models that abstract away from the underlying mechanistic details and provide generalisations? Detailed mechanistic models may afford a complete and precise account of consciousness in human beings and other, physiologically similar mammals. But they do not provide a good model of consciousness in other animals, such as non-vertebrates, let alone artificial systems. Minimal models can be applicable to a wide range of different (...) conscious systems. But do they provide genuine explanations that are autonomous from explanations by detailed mechanistic models? This paper provides a taxonomy of minimal models and measures of consciousness, clarifies their relation to detailed mechanistic models, and highlights benefits of different minimalist approaches to consciousness. (shrink)

When people want to identify the causes of an event, assign credit or blame, or learn from their mistakes, they often reflect on how things could have gone differently. In this kind of reasoning, one considers a counterfactual world in which some events are different from their real-world counterparts and considers what else would have changed. Researchers have recently proposed several probabilistic models that aim to capture how people do (or should) reason about counterfactuals. We present a new model and (...) show that it accounts better for human inferences than several alternative models. Our model builds on the work of Pearl (2000), and extends his approach in a way that accommodates backtracking inferences and that acknowledges the difference between counterfactual interventions and counterfactual observations. We present six new experiments and analyze data from four experiments carried out by Rips (2010), and the results suggest that the new model provides an accurate account of both mean human judgments and the judgments of individuals. (shrink)

Recognizing that truth is socially constructed or that knowledge and power are related is hardly a novelty in the social sciences. In the twenty-first century, however, there appears to be a renewed concern regarding people’s relationship with the truth and the propensity for certain actors to undermine it. Organizations are highly implicated in this, given their central roles in knowledge management and production and their attempts to learn, although the entanglement of these epistemological issues with business ethics has not been (...) engaged as explicitly as it might be. Drawing on work from a virtue epistemology perspective, this paper outlines the idea of a set of epistemic vices permeating organizations, along with examples of unethical epistemic conduct by organizational actors. While existing organizational research has examined various epistemic virtues that make people and organizations effective and responsible epistemic agents, much less is known about the epistemic vices that make them ineffective and irresponsible ones. Accordingly, this paper introduces vice epistemology, a nascent but growing subfield of virtue epistemology which, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explicitly developed in terms of business ethics. The paper concludes by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vice, with implications for responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice. (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)

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984) posed a challenge: provide a satisfying normative account that solves the Non-Identity Problem, avoids the Repugnant and Absurd Conclusions, and solves the Mere-Addition Paradox. In response, some have suggested that we look toward person-affecting views of morality for a solution. But the person-affecting views that have been offered so far have been unable to satisfy Parfit's four requirements, and these views have been subject to a number of independent complaints. This paper describes a person-affecting (...) account which meets Parfit's challenge. The account satisfies Parfit's four requirements, and avoids many of the criticisms that have been raised against person-affecting views. (shrink)

At the heart of the Bayesianism is a rule, Conditionalization, which tells us how to update our beliefs. Typical formulations of this rule are underspecified. This paper considers how, exactly, this rule should be formulated. It focuses on three issues: when a subject’s evidence is received, whether the rule prescribes sequential or interval updates, and whether the rule is narrow or wide scope. After examining these issues, it argues that there are two distinct and equally viable versions of Conditionalization to (...) choose from. And which version we choose has interesting ramifications, bearing on issues such as whether Conditionalization can handle continuous evidence, and whether Jeffrey Conditionalization is really a generalization of Conditionalization. (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)

Après avoir présenté et expliqué la notion de cognition distribuée, je situerai l'analyse qu'elle permet au sein des sciences cognitives et de la sociologie. Mes buts sont de montrer en quoi la théorie de la cognition distribuée contribue aux théories de la psychologie et de la sociologie, et réciproquement comment les théories de la sociologie et de la psychologie peuvent être recrutées pour expliquer l'existence de systèmes de cognition distribuée. La troisième section de ce chapitre est centrée sur les relations (...) entre psychologie et théorie de la cognition distribuée. Elle montre que la sociologie de la cognition distribuée béné à être une sociologie cognitive de la cognition distribuée. La quatrième partie continue cet argument, mais en soulignant les phénomènes typiquement sociologique qui interviennent dans la constitution et l'évolution des systèmes de cognition distribuèe. (shrink)

This chapter explores to what extent some core ideas of predictive processing can be applied to the phenomenology of time consciousness. The focus is on the experienced continuity of consciously perceived, temporally extended phenomena (such as enduring processes and successions of events). The main claim is that the hierarchy of representations posited by hierarchical predictive processing models can contribute to a deepened understanding of the continuity of consciousness. Computationally, such models show that sequences of events can be represented as states (...) of a hierarchy of dynamical systems. Phenomenologically, they suggest a more fine-grained analysis of the perceptual contents of the specious present, in terms of a hierarchy of temporal wholes. Visual perception of static scenes not only contains perceived objects and regions but also spatial gist; similarly, auditory perception of temporal sequences, such as melodies, involves not only perceiving individual notes but also slightly more abstract features (temporal gist), which have longer temporal durations (e.g., emotional character or rhythm). Further investigations into these elusive contents of conscious perception may be facilitated by findings regarding its neural underpinnings. Predictive processing models suggest that sensorimotor areas may influence these contents. (shrink)

This article proposes an approach to understanding life that overcomes reductionist and dualist approaches. Based on Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the cognitive prerequisites of knowing an organism, I refer to an idea of Gertrudis Van de Vijver and colleagues who described a co-constitutive relationship between the cognitive activities of the observer and the living features of the organism. Using the example of a developmental series, I show that within this active and relational process, the self-generating power and teleology of the (...) organism manifest themselves on the mental level of the observer. I posit that the Kantian mode of objectification, which refers to the sensually perceptible appearance of an organism, can be supplemented by an active mode of relational or “communicative” objectification that encompasses the life of the organism and the mind of the observer. By considering the mental processes of the observer which occur during the observation of biological phenomena, this analysis introduces a phenomenological first-person perspective on the study of life “from within”, which enables an empirical investigation of the vital properties of an organism. (shrink)

This chapter sets the scene for the subsequent philosophical discussions by surveying a number of biological interventions that have been used, or might in the future be used, for the purposes of crime prevention. These interventions are pharmaceutical interventions intended to suppress libido, treat substance abuse or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or modulate serotonin activity; nutritional interventions; and electrical and magnetic brain stimulation. Where applicable, we briefly comment on the historical use of these interventions, and in each case we discuss (...) the evidence that they are effective, or might become so with further refinement. The chapter concludes with a comment on some potentially significant differences between the varieties of intervention that we canvass. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the ontogenesis and evolutionary progression of the denizens of the natural world. Given the empirical successes of the evo-devo framework, and its now widespread acceptance, a timely and important task for the philosophy of biology is to critically discern the ontological commitments of that framework and assess whether and to what extent our current metaphysical models are able to accommodate them. In this paper, I argue that one particular model (...) is a natural fit: an ontology of dispositional properties coherently and adequately captures the crucial casual-cum-explanatory role that the fundamental elements of evo-devo play within that framework. (shrink)

The intuitive, folk concept of hypocrisy is not a unified moral category. While many theorists hold that all cases of hypocrisy involve some form of deception, I argue that this is not the case. Instead, I argue for a disjunctive account of hypocrisy whereby all cases of “hypocrisy” involve either the deceiving of others about the sincerity of an agent's beliefs or the lack of will to carry through with the demands of an agent's sincere beliefs. Thus, all cases of (...) hypocrisy can be described either as cases of deception or as cases of akrasia. If this analysis correct, then I suggest further that the moral status of all instances of hypocrisy must be reduced either to the moral blameworthiness of deception or to the moral blameworthiness of akrasia. There can be no unified account of the moral wrongness of “hypocrisy” that holds across the disjunction. (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)

Dispositional properties are often referred to as ‘causal powers’, but what does dispositional causation amount to? Any viable theory must account for two fundamental aspects of the metaphysics of causation – the causal complexity and context sensitivity of causal interactions. The theory of mutual manifestations attempts to do so by locating the complexity and context sensitivity within the nature of dispositions themselves. But is this theory an acceptable first step towards a viable theory of dispositional causation? This paper argues that (...) the reconceptualization that the theory entails comes at too high a price, and is an unnecessary step in the wrong direction: these two central aspects concerning the metaphysics of causation can and should be accounted for in a dispositional account of causation without it. (shrink)

Nudging works through dispositions to decide with specific heuristics, and has three component parts. A nudge is a feature of an environment that enables such a disposition; a person is nudged when such a disposition is triggered; and a person performs a nudged action when such a disposition manifests in action. This analysis clarifies an autonomy-based worry about nudging as used in public policy or for private profit: that a person’s ability to reason well is undermined when she is nudged. (...) Reasoning well is a component of self-guidance, which is an aspect of autonomy and so something there is reason to promote, preserve, or respect. However, a person can reason well when she is nudged: Many of these heuristics are good rules to reason with, and she can be flexible with respect to them when she takes there to be a better way to reason. Along the way, this paper uncovers several design specifications for responsible nudging, and discusses open empirical questions. However, nudging’s being compatible with reasoning well crystallizes a distinct worry about manipulation: that nudge designers can rely on nudged people guiding themselves toward the designers’ own ends. Manipulation of this sort exploits one aspect of autonomy (namely, self-guidance) to undermine autonomy in other respects. (shrink)

Could a sufficiently detailed computer simulation of consciousness replicate consciousness? In other words, is performing the right computations sufficient for artificial consciousness? Or will there remain a difference between simulating and being a conscious system, because the right computations must be implemented in the right way? From the perspective of Karl Friston's free energy principle, self-organising systems (such as living organisms) share a set of properties that could be realised in artificial systems, but are not instantiated by computers with a (...) classical (von Neumann) architecture. I argue that at least one of these properties, viz. a certain kind of causal flow, can be used to draw a distinction between systems that merely simulate, and those that actually replicate consciousness. Since this property is instantiated by all systems that conform to the free energy principle (not just conscious beings), the account on offer here can be extended to draw a distinction between simulating and being a certain type of system, more generally. In particular, this may inform meta-ethical accounts of artificial moral status and artificial moral agency. (shrink)

Common mental health disorders are rising globally, creating a strain on public healthcare systems. This has led to a renewed interest in the role that digital technologies may have for improving mental health outcomes. One result of this interest is the development and use of artificial intelligence for assessing, diagnosing, and treating mental health issues, which we refer to as ‘digital psychiatry’. This article focuses on the increasing use of digital psychiatry outside of clinical settings, in the following sectors: education, (...) employment, financial services, social media, and the digital well-being industry. We analyse the ethical risks of deploying digital psychiatry in these sectors, emphasising key problems and opportunities for public health, and offer recommendations for protecting and promoting public health and well-being in information societies. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the basic philosophical motivations for, and some recent work in, modal set theory.

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 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)

In this paper, I consider the role of perspective in Hegel’s metaphysics, and in particular the role that multiple perspectives play within the ultimate structure in Hegel’s metaphysics, which Hegel calls ‘the idea [die Idee].’ My (somewhat anachronistic) way into this topic will be to inquire about Hegel’s stance on what Adrian Moore has called ‘absolute representations.’ I argue for the claim that perspective is maintained, even in the absolute idea, which generates the task of understanding the nature of that (...) perspective and its compatibility with absoluteness. I attempt to accomplish this task by asking what a logical perspective could be, and how it might be related to visual perspective. Then I inquire into the relation that perspectives have to each other, i.e., to the system of perspectives. I construe those relations in reciprocal and dynamic terms, so that absoluteness takes the form of a structured round of perspectives rather than a relation to reality “once and for all”. (shrink)

According to commonsense psychology, one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. Recent lines of research purport to show that commonsense is mistaken on both of these points: Mack and Rock (1998) tell us that attention is necessary for consciousness, while Kentridge and Heywood (2001) claim that consciousness is not necessary for attention. If these lines of research were successful they would have important (...) implications regarding the prospects of using attention research to inform us about consciousness. The present essay shows that these lines of research are not successful, and that the commonsense picture of the relationship between attention and consciousness can be. (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)

In his paper, Jakob Hohwy outlines a theory of the brain as an organ for prediction-error minimization, which he claims has the potential to profoundly alter our understanding of mind and cognition. One manner in which our understanding of the mind is altered, according to PEM, stems from the neurocentric conception of the mind that falls out of the framework, which portrays the mind as “inferentially-secluded” from its environment. This in turn leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied cognition. (...) Focusing on this aspect of Hohwy’s argument, we first outline the key components of the PEM framework such as the “evidentiary boundary,” before looking at why this leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied cognition. We will argue that although Hohwy may be correct to reject specific theses of embodied cognition, others are in fact implied by the PEM framework and may contribute to its development. We present the metaphor of the “body as a laboratory” in order to highlight wha... (shrink)

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being (...) embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make-true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. (shrink)