Abortion before a state of viability is not the killing of an individual live human being (i.e., a person) because an individual live human being does not exist before a state of viability and thus there is no ‘right to life’ of an individual live human being that is infringed. Reason and biology support this conclusion.

The Black Panther Party was founded to bridge the radical theorizing that swept college campuses in the mid-1960s and the lumpen proletariat abandoned by the so-called ‘Great Society’. However, shortly thereafter, Newton began to harshly criticize the academic Left in general for their drive to find ‘a set of actions and a set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute.’ This article reconstructs Newton’s critique of progressive movements grounded primarily in academic debates, as well as his conception (...) of vanguard political theory. Newton’s grasp of revolution as a gradual, open, and above all dialectical process, not only provides a corrective to many dominant academic accounts of the nature of progressive change but, more importantly, it also grounds an emancipatory philosophy that can direct collective struggle, precisely because it remains grounded in the imperfect and internally conflicted lives of those whose freedom is to be won through it. (shrink)

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

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

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)

This chapter examines the hypothesis that episodic memory is a mindshaped capacity. Presenting evidence from cognitive, developmental, and cross-cultural psychology, we argue that episodic memory is mindshaped for the purposes of interpersonal and social coordination. We examine how cultural influences, parental reminiscing styles, and the constructive nature of memory contribute to such mindshaping, promoting cognitive and behavioral homogeneity. We propose that epistemic norms of remembering are gradually acquired and internalized in practices of joint reminiscing between children and adult caregivers, a (...) crucial component in an extended process of normative enculturation. We also explore the close relationship between episodic memory and imagination, highlighting the ways in which simulated vicarious experiences function as socio-cognitive tools, transforming us into more easily interpretable cognitive objects. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the need for further research to elucidate the varieties and extent of memory mindshaping, shedding light on the nature of episodic memory and its role in the normative enculturation of human rememberers. (shrink)

Propositional contingentism is the thesis that there might have been propositions which might have not have been something. Serious actualism is the thesis that it is impossible for a property to be exemplified without there being something which exemplifies it. Both are popular. Likewise, the dominant view in the metaphysics of modality is that metaphysical possibility and necessity can be understood – in some sense – in terms of possible worlds, i.e. total ways the world could have been. Here, I (...) argue that, given some minimal assumptions, the conjunction of propositional contingentism and serious actualism entails that worlds are modally fragile – every world is ontologically dependent on every proposition. I then show that such a consequence is inconsistent with the claim that propositions true at all possible worlds are necessary. (shrink)

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

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)

Synthetic biology has immense potential to ameliorate widespread environmental damage. The promise of such technology could, however, be argued to potentially risk the public, industry, or governments not curtailing their environmentally damaging behaviour or even worse exploit the possibility of this technology to do further damage. In such cases, there is the risk of a worse outcome than if the technology was not deployed. This risk is often couched as an objection to new technologies, that the technology produces a moral (...) hazard. This paper describes how to navigate a moral hazard argument and mitigate the possibility of a moral hazard. Navigating moral hazard arguments and mitigating the possibility of a moral hazard will improve the public and environmental impact of synthetic biology. (shrink)

The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology is taken to be that period in which a consensus developed among biologists about the major causes of evolution, a consensus that informed research in evolutionary biology for at least a half century. As such, it is a particularly fruitful period to consider when reflecting on the meaning and role of chance in evolutionary explanation. Biologists of this period make reference to “chance” and loose cognates of “chance,” such as: “random,” “contingent,” “accidental,” “haphazard,” or (...) “stochastic.” Of course, what an author might mean by “chance” in any specific context varies. -/- In the following, we first offer a historiographical note on the synthesis. Second, we introduce five ways in which synthesis authors spoke about chance. We do not take these to be an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible ways in which chance meaningfully figures in explanations in evolutionary biology. These are simply five common uses of the term by biologists at this period. They will serve to organize our summary of the collected references to chance and the analysis and discussion of the following questions: • What did synthesis authors understand by chance? • How did these authors see chance operating in evolution? • Did their appeals to chance increase or decrease over time during the synthesis? That is, was there a “hardening” of the synthesis, as Gould claimed (1983)? (shrink)

Brauer (2022) has recently argued that if it is possible that there is nothing, then the correct modal logic for metaphysical modality cannot include D. Here, I argue that Brauer’s argument is unsuccessful; or at the very least significantly weaker than presented. First, I outline a simple argument for why it is not possible that there is nothing. I note that this argument has a well-known solution involving the distinction between truth in and truth at a possible world. However, I (...) then argue that once the semantics presupposed by Brauer’s argument is reformulated in terms of truth at a world, we have good reasons to think that a crucial semantic premise in Brauer’s argument should be rejected in favour of an alternative. Brauer’s argument is, however, no longer valid with this alternative premise. Thus, plausibly Brauer’s argument against D is only valid, if it is not sound. (shrink)

The hazards of the use of English as a default language in analytic philosophy are obvious to everyone except mainstream analytical philosophers. The uncanny conceptual resemblance between what one is told about Jerry Fodor’s universal Language of Thought and current globalese basic academic English calls for reflection. [...] What I am pleading for is not just a matter of paying great attention to other philosophical traditions. It is a matter of understanding how English cannot serve as any centre or point (...) de départ for the description of all cognitive systems. We need to try to define the topology of the human cognitive space where English must show up as the very untypical case of a natural language that it manifestly is. Pace Donald Davidson, English is not the measure of all things. And historical cognitive ethnography is relevant to philosophical epistemology. The indispensable basis for any philosophy with global ambitions is a conceptual “experimental method” applied to the problems of conceptual diversity among human languages regarding not least of all the conceptual schemes of which one’s own philosophical keywords are an integral part. (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)

Much of the philosophical literature on causation has focused on the concept of actual causation, sometimes called token causation. In particular, it is this notion of actual causation that many philosophical theories of causation have attempted to capture.2 In this paper, we address the question: what purpose does this concept serve? As we shall see in the next section, one does not need this concept for purposes of prediction or rational deliberation. What then could the purpose be? We will argue (...) that one can gain an important clue here by looking at the ways in which causal judgments are shaped by people‘s understanding of norms. (shrink)

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

Creators offload the construction of their artifact in that the world helps to determine the nature of their imposition in ways that can go beyond the content of their imposing activities. Extant theories of imposition fail to account for offloading by requiring match between content and product. Therefore, I develop an externalist theory that accommodates offloading by taking the imposition of mind onto world to be objectively constrained. An important kind of imposition is normativity. Focusing on personal value, what’s valuable (...) for someone is determined by what they value as good or bad for themselves. Such a subjectivist view faces the same problem as extant theories of imposition in seeming to preclude the possibility of making mistakes about value. Applying imposition externalism, I defend an artifactual approach to subjectivism such that mistakes are captured in terms of offloading. A subject’s valuing can fail to match the very value it creates. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that, in order to have a concept of time, subjects must have memories of particular events they once witnessed. Some patients with severe amnesia arguably still have a concept of time. Two possible explanations of their grasp of this concept are discussed. They take as their respective starting points abilities preserved in the patients in question: (1) the ability to retain factual information over time despite being unable to recall the past event or situation that (...) information stems from, and (2) the ability to remember at least some past events or situations themselves (typically because retrograde amnesia is not complete). It is argued that a satisfactory explanation of what it is for subjects to have a concept of time must make reference to their having episodic memories such as those mentioned under (2). It is also shown how the question as to whether subjects have such memories, and thus whether they possess a concept of time, enters into our explanation of their actions. (shrink)

After viewing a painting, reading a novel, or seeing a film, audiences often feel that they improve their cognitive standing on the world beyond the canvas, page, or screen. To learn from art in this way, I argue audiences must employ high degrees of epistemic autonomy and creativity, engaging in a process I call ‘insight through art.’ Some have worried that insight through art uses audience achievements to explain an artwork’s cognitive and artistic value, thereby failing to properly appreciate the (...) cognitive and artistic achievements of artists. I move against this worry by arguing that in order to learn via insight through art audiences must collaborate with artists, sharing the labour and credit for the cognitive achievements they co-produce. I claim this co-productive outlook reveals that our appreciation of art’s cognitive and artistic value involves far more audience participation than has hitherto been realised. (shrink)

Many draw the distinction between truth in, and truth at, a possible world. The latter notion purportedly allows for propositions to be true relative to worlds even if they do not exist relative to those same worlds. Despite its wide application, the distinction is controversial. Some think that the notion of truth at a world is unintelligible. Here, I outline and discuss the most influential argument for the unintelligibility of truth at a world, The Picture Thinking Argument. I outline and (...) defend a neglected strategy to respond to this, arguing that if we take seriously the idea that possible worlds represent total ways the world could be, the distinction can be drawn intelligibly. (shrink)

This article outlines an epistemological perspective to understand the organism as a temporally changing whole. To analyze the mental faculties involved, the organism’s development and persisting existence is differentiated into four interdependent aspects: descent, future existence, persistent species, and environmentally adapted physical appearance. It is outlined that these aspects are recognized by comparative memory, concept-guided anticipation, conceptual thinking, and sensory perception, respectively. Furthermore, it is pointed out that these aspects correspond to the famous four Aristotelian “causes” or principles of explanation. (...) The descent of an organism corresponds to Aristotle’s efficient principle (“where does it come from?”), its future existence to the final principle (“what is if for?”), its physical structure to the material principle (“out of what is it?”) and its persistent species to the formal principle (“what is it?”). Aristotle regarded the unity of the efficient, formal and final principle as the ontological cause of the organism and called it the “soul” (psyche), while the material principle can be understood to represent its “body” (soma). I suggest that Aristotle’s “soul” corresponds to three of the four mental faculties required for cognition of a self-maintaining organism. I argue that in a Kantian perspective, the Aristotelian “soul” represents the condition for recognizing an organism at all. Therefore, the Aristotelian principle of life becomes intelligible and even empirically observable through the inner sense. In summary, I suggest that the four aspects of the organism described here can be viewed as the general, epistemological and ontological principle of the organism, the Bio-Logos. (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)

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)

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)

The article presents the most important systematic philosophical questions and problems regarding altruism, outlines various answers to these, discusses them, develops precise definitions of ‘altruism’ / ‘altruistic’, 'self-interested', 'egoistic', etc. and develops a normative theory of altruism. The starting point is an assumption about the ethical function of the normative concept of altruism, namely that it captures an ideal: acting for the benefit of others beyond one's moral duty. On this basis, the normative concept of altruism is defined. This is (...) followed by an overview of the ethics that explicitly or implicitly advocate altruism. The subsequent discussion of psychological altruism centres on the question of whether and, if so, which human motives may be intrinsically aimed at the good of others. The most important such motive is acting out of empathy. The final section addresses whether and how altruistic action can be rational. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love offers a wide array of original essays on the nature and value of love. The editors, Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, have assembled an esteemed group of thinkers, including both established scholars and younger voices. The volume contains thirty-three essays addressing both issues about love as well as key philosophers who have contributed to the philosophy of love, such as Plato, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Murdoch. The topics range from central issues about (...) the nature and variety of love, the possibility of its rational justification, and whether it is an emotion, to the significance of love for law, economics, morality, and free will. The volume also contains an introduction to the subject as well as essays on love’s relation to jealousy, biotechnology, religion, knowledge, and several other topics. This wide-ranging handbook will be a key resource for specialists working on the philosophy of love, and a helpful guide for those looking to learn more about the area. (shrink)

Deference principles are principles that describe when, and to what extent, it’s rational to defer to others. Recently, some authors have used such principles to argue for Evidential Uniqueness, the claim that for every batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that it’s permissible for subjects with that total evidence to have. This paper has two aims. The first aim is to assess these deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. I’ll show that these arguments only work given a particular kind (...) of deference principle, and I’ll argue that there are reasons to reject these kinds of principles. The second aim of this paper is to spell out what a plausible generalized deference principle looks like. I’ll start by offering a principled rationale for taking deference to constrain rational belief. Then I’ll flesh out the kind of deference principle suggested by this rationale. Finally, I’ll show that this principle is both more plausible and more general than the principles used in the deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to a special issue of the journal Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, On Understanding and Explaining Schizophrenia. The article identifies a common thread running through the different contributions to this special issue, inspired by Jaspers's (1963) suggestion that a profound impairment in the ability to engage in interpersonal and social relations is a key factor in psychiatric disorders. It is argued that this suggestion can help solve a central dilemma in psychopathology, which is to make intelligible (...) the emergence and nature of psychiatric phenomena involving disturbances of rationality, intentionality and self-consciousness, whilst at the same time accounting for a sense in which such phenomena resist understanding. (shrink)

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)

I distinguish several doctrines that economic methodologists have found attractive, all of which have a positivist flavour. One of these is the doctrine that preference assignments in economics are just shorthand descriptions of agents' choice behaviour. Although most of these doctrines are problematic, the latter doctrine about preference assignments is a respectable one, I argue. It doesn't entail any of the problematic doctrines, and indeed it is warranted independently of them.

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

A response to Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya's 'Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes'.

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

We discuss the social-epistemic aspects of Catherine Elgin’s theory of reflective equilibrium and understanding and argue that it yields an argument for the view that a crucial social-epistemic function of epistemic authorities is to foster understanding in their communities. We explore the competences that enable epistemic authorities to fulfil this role and argue that among them is an epistemic virtue we call “epistemic empathy”.

Kevin Elliott and others separate two common arguments for the legitimacy of societal values in scientific reasoning as the gap and the error arguments. This article poses two questions: How are these two arguments related, and what can we learn from their interrelation? I contend that we can better understand the error argument as nested within the gap because the error is a limited case of the gap with narrower features. Furthermore, this nestedness provides philosophers with conceptual tools for analyzing (...) more robustly how values pervade science. (shrink)

In Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson claims that the possibilism-actualism (P-A) distinction is badly muddled. In its place, he introduces a necessitism-contingentism (N-C) distinction that he claims is free of the confusions that purportedly plague the P-A distinction. In this paper I argue first that the P-A distinction, properly understood, is historically well-grounded and entirely coherent. I then look at the two arguments Williamson levels at the P-A distinction and find them wanting and show, moreover, that, when the N-C (...) distinction is broadened (as per Williamson himself) so as to enable necessitists to fend off contingentist objections, the P-A distinction can be faithfully reconstructed in terms of the N-C distinction. However, Williamson’s critique does point to a genuine shortcoming in the common formulation of the P-A distinction. I propose a new definition of the distinction in terms of essential properties that avoids this shortcoming. (shrink)

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

Conditionalization is a widely endorsed rule for updating one’s beliefs. But a sea of complaints have been raised about it, including worries regarding how the rule handles error correction, changing desiderata of theory choice, evidence loss, self-locating beliefs, learning about new theories, and confirmation. In light of such worries, a number of authors have suggested replacing Conditionalization with a different rule — one that appeals to what I’ll call “ur-priors”. But different authors have understood the rule in different ways, and (...) these different understandings solve different problems. In this paper, I aim to map out the terrain regarding these issues. I survey the different problems that might motivate the adoption of such a rule, flesh out the different understandings of the rule that have been proposed, and assess their pros and cons. I conclude by suggesting that one particular batch of proposals, proposals that appeal to what I’ll call “loaded evidential standards”, are especially promising. (shrink)

“1.2. The contract is a process that facilitates transition from the living constitution to a formal Constitution of the Earth to guarantee that the conditions for the human can continue.”.

In the recent literature on episodic memory, there has been increasing recognition of the need to provide an account of its adaptive function. In this context, it is sometimes argued that episodic memory is critical for certain forms of decision making about the future. We criticize existing accounts that try to give episodic memory a role in decision making, before giving a novel such account of our own. This turns on the thought of a link between episodic memory and the (...) emotion of regret. We discuss how both experienced and anticipated regret can have a distinctive influence on decision making, and argue that the ability to recollect past events in episodic memory underpins the capacity to engage in the sophisticated types of mental time travel recruited in experiencing and anticipating regret. (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)

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

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

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)

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

Should economics study the psychological basis of agents' choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between "mentalist'' answers to this question and rival "behavioural'' answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the "functionalist'' variety (Dietrich and List, 2016). Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input--output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some (...) risky commitments about the plasticity of agents' choice dispositions. (shrink)

Standard decision theory has trouble handling cases involving acts without finite expected values. This paper has two aims. First, building on earlier work by Colyvan (2008), Easwaran (2014), and Lauwers and Vallentyne (2016), it develops a proposal for dealing with such cases, Difference Minimizing Theory. Difference Minimizing Theory provides satisfactory verdicts in a broader range of cases than its predecessors. And it vindicates two highly plausible principles of standard decision theory, Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. The second aim is to (...) assess some recent arguments against Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. If successful, these arguments refute Difference Minimizing Theory. This paper contends that these arguments are not successful. (shrink)