Believing that p, assuming that p, and imagining that p involve regarding p as true—or, as we shall call it, accepting p. What distinguishes belief from the other modes of acceptance? We claim that conceiving of an attitude as a belief, rather than an assumption or an instance of imagining, entails conceiving of it as an acceptance that is regulated for truth, while also applying to it the standard of being correct if and only if it is true. We argue (...) that the second half of this claim, according to which the concept of belief includes a standard of correctness, is required to explain the fact that the deliberative question whether to believe that p is transparent to the question whether p. This argument raises various questions. Is there such a thing as deliberating whether to believe? Is the transparency of the deliberative question whether to believe that p the same as the transparency of the factual question whether I do believe that p? We will begin by answering these questions and then turn to a series of possible objections to our argument. (shrink)

Contractarians aim to derive moral principles from the dictates of instrumental rationality alone. But it is well-known that contractarian moral theories struggle to identify normative principles that are both uniquely rational and morally compelling. Michael Moehler's recent book, *Minimal Morality* seeks to avoid these difficulties by developing a novel "two-level" social contract theory, which restricts the scope of contractarian morality to cases of deep and persistent moral disagreement. Yet Moehler remains ambitious, arguing that a restricted version of Kant's categorical imperative (...) is a uniquely rational principle of conflict resolution. We develop a formal model of Moehler's informal game-theoretic argument, which reconstructs a valid argument for Moehler's conclusion. This model, in turn, enables us to expose how a successful argument for Moehler's contractarian principle rests on assumptions that can only be justified by subtle yet significant departures from the standard conception of rationality. We thus extend our understanding of familiar contractarian difficulties by showing how they arise even if we restrict the scope of contractarian morality to a domain where its application seems both promising and necessary. We show that the problem lies not in contractarians' immodest ambitions but in the modest resources rationality can offer to satisfy them. (shrink)

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

In the late 19th century, physiologists such as David Ferrier, Eduard Hitzig, and Hermann Munk argued that cerebral brain functions are localized in discrete structures. By the early 20th century, this became the dominant position. However, another prominent physiologist, Friedrich Goltz, rejected theories of cerebral localization and argued against these physiologists until his death in 1902. I argue in this paper that previous historical accounts have failed to comprehend why Goltz rejected cerebral localization. I show that Goltz adhered to (...) a falsificationist methodology, and I reconstruct how he designed his experiments and weighted different kinds of evidence. I then draw on the exploratory experimentation literature from recent philosophy of science to trace one root of the debate to differences in how the German localizers designed their experiments and reasoned about evidence. While Goltz designed his experiments to test hypotheses about the functions of predetermined cerebral structures, the localizers explored new functions and structures in the process of constructing new theories. I argue that the localizers relied on untested background conjectures to justify their inferences about functional organization. These background conjectures collapsed a distinction between phenomena they produced direct evidence for (localized symptoms) and what they reached conclusions about (localized functions). (shrink)

This paper argues that higher-order doubt generates an epistemic dilemma. One has a higher-order doubt with regards to P insofar as one justifiably withholds belief as to what attitude towards P is justified. That is, one justifiably withholds belief as to whether one is justified in believing, disbelieving, or withholding belief in P. Using the resources provided by Richard Feldman’s recent discussion of how to respect one’s evidence, I argue that if one has a higher-order doubt with regards to P, (...) then one is not justified in having any attitude towards P. Otherwise put: No attitude towards the doubted proposition respects one’s higher-order doubt. I argue that the most promising response to this problem is to hold that when one has a higher-order doubt about P, the best one can do to respect such a doubt is to simply have no attitude towards P. Higher-order doubt is thus much more rationally corrosive than non-higher-order doubt, as it undermines the possibility of justifiably having any attitude towards the doubted proposition. (shrink)

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry Stapp.

Tradução para o português de "Uma espécie de história de minha vida" (A kind of history of my life), ou Carta a um médico (A Letter to a Physician), uma carta escrita por Hume (1711-1776), endereçada em março ou abril de 1734 a um médico não identificado (segundo Norton provavelmente John Arbuthnot ou George Cheyne), na qual Hume pede alguns conselhos para continuar com o seu trabalho filosófico. O título atual é extraído do primeiro parágrafo.A carta foi escrita em 1734, (...) um pouco antes de Hume viajar para Bristol, onde, “forçado a fazer uma rápida incursão em uma vida mais ativa”, conforme relata em sua autobiografia Minha vida, buscou empregar-se no comércio. A importância dessa carta reside no seu caráter autobiográfico e nos comentários que Hume faz sobre seu projeto filosófico. A carta foi publicada originalmente em Life and correspondence of David Hume, John Hill Burton(Ed.), Edinburgh 1846, v. 1, p. 30-39; ela foi reproduzida em The Letters of David Hume. Grey, J. Y. T. (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, 2v; v.1, n.3, p. 12-18, e pode ser encontrada também em The Cambridge companion to Hume, David Fate Norton, Jacqueline Taylor (ed.) 2 ed. Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 515-522. Para essa tradução consultamos o texto original conforme apresentado nas duas últimas edições aqui mencionadas. (shrink)

On explanationist accounts of genealogical debunking, roughly, a belief is debunked when its explanation is not suitably related to its content. We argue that explanationism cannot accommodate cases in which beliefs are explained by factors unrelated to their contents but are nonetheless independently justified. Justification-specific versions of explanationism face an iteration of the problem. The best account of debunking is a probabilistic account according to which subject S’s justification J for their belief that P is debunked when S learns that (...) J is no more likely to be true on the hypothesis that P than on the hypothesis that ¬P. The probabilistic criterion is fully general, applying not only to cases where the learned undercutting defeater is a proposition about our beliefs or other mental states but to any case of undercutting defeat, providing the grounds for a debunking argument against the existence of a special, metacognitive debunking principle. (shrink)

What is the relationship between Immodesty and Permissivism? For permissivists, epistemically rational agents are sometimes permitted to take incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P. Immodesty is a requirement governing our estimations or beliefs about our own credences and standards. If agents believe that their standards and credences are not among the most truth-conducive ones available to them, they are not immodest. Some philosophers think that Immodesty is incompatible with Intrapersonal Permissivism :41–56, 2014, J Philos 116:237–262, 2019). Others think that Immodesty can (...) be used to respond to some objections against Interpersonal Permissivism :193–218). In this paper, we argue that Immodesty neither supports nor disproves Permissivism. (shrink)

This is a copy of the presentation given at the "Workshop on Agency and Distributed Cognition" at Macquarie University, March 2012. What is noteworthy about this piece of work is that (i) it is a very early foray into the pedagogy, ontology, and epistemology of virtual worlds (it's 2012, way before David Chalmers' book "Reality+" in 2022); and (ii) it was my first foray into "social epistemology" beyond the standard "S knows that p" epistemology, drawing on Vygotskian collaborative approaches (...) to learning and teaching, moving beyond analytic philosophy into educational research. Finally, (iii) there's a hyperlink to the actual virtual world in Unity3D created by a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from Sydney University and Macquarie University for the purposes of teaching scientific inquiry. (shrink)

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

One strategy in recent discussions of theological fatalism is to draw on Harry Frankfurt’s famous counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) to defend human freedom from divine foreknowledge. For those who endorse this line, “Frankfurt counterexamples” are supposed to show that PAP is false, and this conclusion is then extended to the foreknowledge case. This makes it critical to determine whether Frankfurt counterexamples perform as advertised, an issue recently debated in this journal via a pair of articles by (...) David Widerker and John Martin Fischer. I suggest that this debate can be avoided: divine foreknowledge is itself aparadigmatic counterexample to PAP, requiring no support from suspect Frankfurt counterexamples. (shrink)

The principle that one cannot deliberate over what one already knows is going to happen, when suitably qualified, has seemed to many philosophers to be about as secure a truth as one is likely to find in this life. Fortunately, it poses little restriction on human deliberation, since the conditions which would trigger its prohibition seldom arise for us: our knowledge of the future is intermittent at best, and those things of which we do have advance knowledge are not the (...) sorts of things over which we would deliberate in any case. But matters appear to stand otherwise with an all-knowing agent such as God is traditionally conceived to be; for what an omniprescient deity ‘already knows is going to happen’ is everything that is going to happen; and if He cannot deliberate over such things, there is nothing over which He can deliberate. (shrink)

Many differences exist between the logical relations “equality” and “equivalence”. In this monograph I point out differences that concern definition, linguistics, computational gates and tables, denotation, application, negation of terms, negation of the relation, relations to other relations, the laws of symmetry, transitivity and reflexivity, the laws of commutation and permutation, the law of tautology, the law of distribution, the law of association, propositional meaning, and “genesis”. I also point out a form of “symmetry breaking”: the negation of some equality (...) may yield some non-equality, while the negation of that non-equality might not yield the same equality. (For full access: use the website link of the title page. -- Copyright License: CC BY-NC-ND. -- DOI: 10.17026/dans-zh3-h2b2 --). (shrink)

This paper seeks to rehabilitate St. Augustine’s widely dismissed response to the alleged incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will. This requires taking a fresh look at his analysis in On Free Choice of the Will, and arguing its relevance to the current debate. Along the way, mistaken interpretations of Augustine are rebutted, his real solution is developed and defended, a reason for his not anticipating Boethius’s a temporalist solution is suggested, a favorable comparison with Ockham is made, rival solutions (...) are rejected, and the aporetic nature of the problem is explained. (shrink)

The computational genomics community has come increasingly to rely on the methodology of creating annotations of scientific literature using terms from controlled structured vocabularies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). We here address the question of what such annotations signify and of how they are created by working biologists. Our goal is to promote a better understanding of how the results of experiments are captured in annotations in the hope that this will lead to better representations of biological reality through (...) both the annotation process and ontology development, and in more informed use of the GO resources by experimental scientists. (shrink)

This is a contribution to an Author Meets Critics special issue on John Martin Fischer's _Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will_.

The traditional doctrine of divine omniscience ascribes to God the fully exercised power to know all truths. but why is God’s excellence with respect to knowing not treated on a par with his excellence with respect to doing, where the latter requires only that God have the power to do all things? The prima facie problem with divine ”omni-knowledgeability’ -- roughly, being able to know whatever one wants to know whenever one wants to know it -- is that knowledge requires (...) an internal representation, whereas mere ”knowledgeability’ does not. I argue to the contrary that knowledge does not require an internal representation, and that even if it did, an omni-knowledgeable God would satisfy this requirement. omni-knowledgeability therefore represents a distinct understanding of God’s cognitive excellence while satisfying the traditional insistence on full omniscience. (shrink)

I distinguish between a _metaphysical_ problem generated by the argument for theological fatalism, and a _theological_ problem posed by the argument. Some responses to the argument, including ones associated with Boethius, Aquinas and Ockham, address only the theological problem. Even if such responses succeed in showing that God's foreknowledge doesn't threaten human freedom, they fail to take the full measure of the argument for theological fatalism, since the metaphysical problem remains to be solved.

The paper that follows continues a discussion with Tomis Kapitan in the pages of this journal over the compatibility of divine agency with divine foreknowledge. I had earlier argued against two premises in Kapitan's case for omniscient impotence: (i) that intentionally A-ing presupposes prior acquisition of the intention to A, and (ii) that acquiring the intention to A presupposes prior ignorance whether one will A. In response to my criticisms, Kapitan has recently offered new defences for these two premises. I (...) show in reply why neither defence succeeds in rehabilitating the case against omniscient agency. (Note that the very first sentence of the published version has a misprint: instead of "To claim that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with divine agency has been pressed with increasing frequency of late . . .", it should read, "_The_ claim . . ."!). (shrink)

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u_{F}={x|F(x)} for a property F() could never be self-predicative in the sense of u_{F}∈u_{F}. But the mathematical theory of categories, (...) dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals--which can be seen as forming the "other bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought. (shrink)

I first argue that the Matrix trilogy is a Gnostic cyber-epic; I then use this interpretive lens to review the films' treatment of fundamental questions in epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory.

The paper explores possible resources available to Plotinus for responding to Plato's famous "Third Man Argument" in the _Parmenides_.

Can free agency exist within a Minkowskian "block universe"? A negative answer to this question has been labeled 'chronogeometrical fatalism'. I look at five theses associated with Minkowskian space-time which have been thought to entail chronogeometrical fatalism, and argue that none of them delivers the goods.

According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s, has led to two ongoing debates. One is (...) a theoretical debate over the very intelligibility of middle knowledge;1 the other is a practical debate over its philosophical and theological utility.2. (shrink)

The most serious challenge to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) comes in the form of a dilemma: either the counterexample presupposes determinism, in which case it begs the question; or it does not presuppose determinism, in which case it fails to deliver on its promise to eliminate all alternatives that might plausibly be thought to satisfy PAP. I respond to this challenge with a counterexample in which considering an alternative course of action is a necessary condition (...) for deciding to act otherwise, and the agent does not in fact consider the alternative. I call this a “buffer case,” because the morally relevant alternative is “buffered” by the requirement that the agent first consider the alternative. Suppose further that the agent’s considering an alternative action—entering the buffer zone—is what would trigger the counterfactual intervener. Then it would appear that PAP-relevant alternatives are out of reach. I defend this counterexample to PAP against three objections: that considering an alternative is itself a morally relevant alternative; that buffer cases can be shown to contain other alternatives that arguably satisfy PAP; and that even if the agent’s present access to PAP-relevant alternatives were eliminated, PAP could still be satisfied in virtue of earlier alternatives. I conclude that alternative possibilities are a normal symptom, but not an essential constituent, of moral agency. (shrink)

The problem considered in this chapter emerges from the tension we find when looking at the design and architecture of chatbots on the one hand and their conversational aptitude on the other. In the way that LLM chatbots are designed and built, we have good reason to suppose they don't possess second-order capacities such as intention, belief or knowledge. Yet theories of conversation make great use of second-order capacities of speakers and their audiences to explain how aspects of interaction succeed. (...) As we can all bear witness to now though, at the point of use chatbots appear capable of performing language tasks at a level close to that of humans. This creates a tension when we consider something like, for example, the classic Gricean theory of implicature. On a broad summary of this type of account, to utter p and implicate q requires the reflexive occurrence of an audience supposing a speaker believes that q, and the speaker believing that their audience can determine they believe it when they utter p. So taken at face value, if a chatbot doesn’t have the capacity for belief, then either in their role as speaker or audience, they would not seem capable of either generating or comprehending implicatures. Yet on the surface it does seem that chatbots are capable of dealing with (some) implicatures, and as such it raises questions about how we should then correlate this with what we think occurs in cases of implicature with chatbots. (shrink)

Son varias las posturas que sostienen que la relación de Jean-Paul Sartre y Simone de Beauvoir en el campo filosófico no encuentra mayores coincidencias, por lo que se sugiere la interpretación de que no realizaron un trabajo en conjunto en la construcción del existencialismo. Sin embargo, también son muchas las posiciones que otorgan un sentido de estrecho trabajo filosófico entre él y ella. A pesar de las distintas posturas, podemos encontrar claramente ciertas coincidencias en sus trabajos que ayudaron a la (...) construcción de esta postura filosófica. Este texto se propone analizar la defensa del existencialismo realizada por Sartre y Beauvoir en contra del pensamiento dogmático del siglo XX. A partir del existencialismo propuesto por ambos autores se intenta mostrar al hombre de manera abierta, sin adornos que lo definan de manera absoluta, negando entidades trascendentes que guíen su destino: el destino del hombre es lo que éste hace de sí mismo. Así pues, se busca presentar al existencialismo en contravía de cualquier rasgo de mistificación que se genere en el terreno de la existencia humana. (shrink)