How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

A natural view of testimony holds that a source's statements provide one with evidence about what the source believes, which in turn provides one with evidence about what is true. But some theorists have gone further and developed a broadly analogous view of memory. According to this view, which this essay calls the “diary model,” one's memory ordinarily serves as a means for one's present self to gain evidence about one's past judgments, and in turn about the truth. This essay (...) rejects the diary model's analogy between memory and testimony from one's former self, arguing first that memory and a diary differ with respect to their psychological roles, and second that this psychological difference underwrites important downstream epistemic differences. The resulting view stands opposed to prominent discussions of memory and testimony, which either, like the diary model, treat memory by analogy to what we naively wish to say about testimony, or which instead attempt to extend to testimony the epistemically preservative role of memory. (shrink)

We present data and argument to show that in Tetris - a real-time interactive video game - certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world rather than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some translations and rotations are best understood as using the world to improve cognition. These actions are not used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction; they are used to (...) change the world in order to simplify the problem-solving task. Thus, we distinguish pragmatic actions ñ actions performed to bring one physically closer to a goal - from epistemic actions - actions performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally. To illustrate the need for epistemic actions, we first develop a standard information-processing model of Tetris-cognition, and show that it cannot explain performance data from human players of the game - even when we relax the assumption of fully sequential processing. Standard models disregard many actions taken by players because they appear unmotivated or superfluous. However, we describe many such actions that are actually taken by players that are far from superfluous, and that play valuable roles in improving human performance. We argue that traditional accounts are limited because they regard action as having a single function: to change the world. By recognizing a second function of action - an epistemic function - we can explain many of the actions that a traditional model cannot. Although, our argument is supported by numerous examples specifically from Tetris, we outline how the one category of epistemic action can be incorporated into theories of action more generally. (shrink)

If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitimate to verify the source’s reliability by appealing to that source’s own testimony. Is this because it is illegitimate to trust a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever? Or is there a distinctive problem with appealing to the source’s testimony on the matter of that source’s own reliability? After distinguishing between two kinds of epistemically illegitimate circularity—bootstrapping and self-verification—I argue for a qualified version of (...) the claim that there is nothing especially illegitimate about using a questionable source to evaluate its own reliability. Instead, it is illegitimate to appeal to a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever, with the matter of the source’s own reliability serving only as a special case. (shrink)

I argue that, unlike your brain, you are not composed of other things: you are simple. My argument centers on what I take to be an uncontroversial datum: for any pair of conscious beings, it is impossible for the pair itself to be conscious. Consider, for instance, the pair comprising you and me. You might pinch your arm and feel a pain. I might simultaneously pinch my arm and feel a qualitatively identical pain. But the pair we form would not (...) feel a thing.1 Pairs of people themselves are incapable of experience. Call this The Datum. What explains The Datum? I think the following exhaust the reasonable options. (1) Pairs of people lack a sufficient number of immediate parts. (2) Pairs of people lack immediate parts capable of standing in the right sorts of relations to each other and their environment. (3) Pairs of people lack immediate parts of the right nature. (4) Pairs of people are not structures (they are unstructured collections of their two immediate parts). (5) Some combination of (1) – (4). Finally, (6) pairs of people are not simple. (shrink)

This paper offers both a theoretical and an experimental perspective on the relationship between connectionist and Classical (symbol-processing) models. Firstly, a serious flaw in Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument against connectionism is pointed out: if, in fact, a part of their argument is valid, then it establishes a conclusion quite different from that which they intend, a conclusion which is demonstrably false. The source of this flaw is traced to an underestimation of the differences between localist and distributed representation. It has (...) been claimed that distributed representations cannot support systematic operations, or that if they can, then they will be mere implementations of traditional ideas. This paper presents experimental evidence against this conclusion: distributed representations can be used to support direct structure-sensitive operations, in a man- ner quite unlike the Classical approach. Finally, it is argued that even if Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument that connectionist models of compositionality must be mere implementations were correct, then this would still not be a serious argument against connectionism as a theory of mind. (shrink)

This paper presents and motivates a new philosophical and logical approach to truth and semantic paradox. It begins from an inferentialist, and particularly bilateralist, theory of meaning---one which takes meaning to be constituted by assertibility and deniability conditions---and shows how the usual multiple-conclusion sequent calculus for classical logic can be given an inferentialist motivation, leaving classical model theory as of only derivative importance. The paper then uses this theory of meaning to present and motivate a logical system---ST---that conservatively extends classical (...) logic with a fully transparent truth predicate. This system is shown to allow for classical reasoning over the full (truth-involving) vocabulary, but to be non-transitive. Some special cases where transitivity does hold are outlined. ST is also shown to give rise to a familiar sort of model for non-classical logics: Kripke fixed points on the Strong Kleene valuation scheme. Finally, to give a theory of paradoxical sentences, a distinction is drawn between two varieties of assertion and two varieties of denial. On one variety, paradoxical sentences cannot be either asserted or denied; on the other, they must be both asserted and denied. The target theory is compared favourably to more familiar related systems, and some objections are considered. (shrink)

Consequentialism, many philosophers have claimed, asks too much of us to be a plausible ethical theory. Indeed, the theory's severe demandingness is often claimed to be its chief flaw. My thesis is that as we come to better understand this objection, we see that, even if it signals or tracks the existence of a real problem for Consequentialism, it cannot itself be a fundamental problem with the view. The objection cannot itself provide good reason to break with Consequentialism, because it (...) must presuppose prior and independent breaks with the view. The way the objection measures the demandingness of an ethical theory reflects rather than justifies being in the grip of key anti-Consequentialist conclusions. We should reject Consequentialism independently of the Objection or not at all. Thus, we can reduce by one the list of worrisome fundamental complaints against Consequentialism. (shrink)

A wide range of prominent epistemological theories include a principle of conservatism. Such principles take the fact that an agent currently holds a certain belief to constitute at least some measure of epistemic justification for her to maintain that belief. I examine the main arguments that have been made in conservatism's behalf, and find them unsound. Most interestingly, conservatism does not fall out of confirmational holism (the view that the justification of each of our beliefs is in part determined by (...) our other beliefs). I argue that conservatism is a mild form of dogmatism, and should be abandoned. (shrink)

Much recent discussion in the philosophy of mathematics has concerned the indispensability argument—an argument which aims to establish the existence of abstract mathematical objects through appealing to the role that mathematics plays in empirical science. The indispensability argument is standardly attributed to W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam. In this paper, I show that this attribution is mistaken. Quine's argument for the existence of abstract mathematical objects differs from the argument which many philosophers of mathematics ascribe to him. Contrary to (...) appearances, Putnam did not argue for the existence of abstract mathematical objects at all. I close by suggesting that attention to Quine and Putnam's writings reveals some neglected arguments for platonism which may be superior to the indispensability argument. (shrink)

The most immediately appealing model for formal constraints on degrees of belief is provided by probability theory, which tells us, for instance, that the probability of P can never be greater than that of (P v Q). But while this model has much intuitive appeal, many have been concerned to provide arguments showing that ideally rational degrees of belief would conform to the calculus of probabilities. The arguments most frequently used to make this claim plausible are the so-called "Dutch Book" (...) arguments. (shrink)

In the past few years, a number of philosophers ; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004) have maintained the following three theses: there is a distinctive sort of phenomenology characteristic of conscious thought, as opposed to other sorts of conscious mental states; different conscious thoughts have different phenomenologies; and thoughts with the same phenomenology have the same intentional content. The last of these three claims is open to at least two different interpretations. It might mean that the phenomenology of a (...) thought expresses its intentional content, where intentional content is understood as propositional, and propositions are understood as mind-and language-independent abstract entities. And it might mean that the phenomenology of a thought is its intentional content—that is, that the phenomenology of a thought, like the phenomenology of a sensation, constitutes its content. The second sort of view is a kind of psychologism. Psychologistic views hold that one or another sort of thing—numbers, sentences, propositions, etc.—that we can think or know about is in fact a kind of mental thing. Since Frege, psychologism has been in bad repute among analytic philosophers. It is widely held that Frege showed that such views are untenable, since, among other things, they subjectivize what is in fact objective, and, hence, relativize such things as consistency and truth to the peculiarities of human psychology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of the thesis that intentional mental content is phenomenological and to try to reach a conclusion about whether it yields a tenable view of mind, thought and meaning. I believe the thesis is not so obviously wrong as it will strike many philosophers of mind and language. In fact, it can be defended against the standard objections to psychologism, and it can provide the basis for a novel and interesting account of mentality. (shrink)

Much contemporary epistemology is informed by a kind of confirmational holism, and a consequent rejection of the assumption that all confirmation rests on experiential certainties. Another prominent theme is that belief comes in degrees, and that rationality requires apportioning one's degrees of belief reasonably. Bayesian confirmation models based on Jeffrey Conditionalization attempt to bring together these two appealing strands. I argue, however, that these models cannot account for a certain aspect of confirmation that would be accounted for in any adequate (...) holistic confirmation theory. I then survey the prospects for constructing a formal epistemology that better accommodates holistic insights. (shrink)

This paper considers the phenomenon of lying and the implications it has for those subjects who are capable of lying. It is argued that lying is not just intentional untruthfulness, but is intentional untruthfulness plus an insincere invocation of trust. Understood in this way, lying demands of liars a sophistication in relation to themselves, to language, and to those to whom they lie which exceeds the demands on mere truth-tellers.

Both Representation Theorem Arguments and Dutch Book Arguments support taking probabilistic coherence as an epistemic norm. Both depend on connecting beliefs to preferences, which are not clearly within the epistemic domain. Moreover, these connections are standardly grounded in questionable definitional/metaphysical claims. The paper argues that these definitional/metaphysical claims are insupportable. It offers a way of reconceiving Representation Theorem arguments which avoids the untenable premises. It then develops a parallel approach to Dutch Book Arguments, and compares the results. In each case (...) preferencedefects serve as a diagnostic tool, indicating purely epistemic defects. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form F a ∧ ¬F a, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F , or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of ‘rich’, then ‘Jackie is rich and Jackie isn’t rich’ is a borderline contradiction. Many theories (...) of vague language have entailments about borderline contradictions; correctly describing the behavior of borderline contradictions is one of the many tasks facing anyone offering a theory of vague language. Here, I first briefly review claims made by various theorists about these borderline contradictions, attempting to draw out some predictions about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Second, I present an experiment intended to gather relevant data about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Finally, I discuss the experimental results in light of several different theories of vagueness, to see what explanations are available. My conclusions are necessarily tentative; I do not attempt to use the present experiment to demonstrate that any single theory is incontrovertibly true. Rather, I try to sketch the auxiliary hypotheses that would need to be conjoined to several extant theories of vague language to predict the present result, and offer some considerations regarding the plausibility of these various hypotheses. In the end, I conclude that two of the theories I consider are better-positioned to account for the observed data than are the others. But the field of logically-informed research on people’s actual responses to vague predicates is young; surely as more data come in we will learn a great deal more about which (if any) of these theories best accounts for the behavior of ordinary speakers. (shrink)

The situationist literature in psychology claims that conduct is not determined by character and reflects the operation of the agent's situation or environment. For instance, due to situational factors, compassionate behavior is much less common than we might have expected from people we believe to be compassionate. This article focuses on whether situationism should revise our beliefs about moral responsibility. It assesses the implications of situationism against the backdrop of a conception of responsibility that is grounded in norms about the (...) fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing that require that agents to be normatively competent and possess situational control. Despite the low incidence of compassionate behavior revealed in situationist studies, situationism threatens neither situational control nor normative competence. Nonetheless situationism may force revision of our views about responsibility in particular contexts, such as wartime wrongdoing. Whereas a good case can be made that the heat of battle can create situational pressures that significantly impair normative competence and thus sometimes provide a full or partial excuse, there is reason to be skeptical of attempts to generalize this excuse to other contexts of wartime wrongdoing. If so, moral responsibility can take situationism on board without capsizing the boat. (shrink)

A given causal system can be represented in a variety of ways. How do agents determine which variables to include in their causal representations, and at what level of granularity? Using techniques from Bayesian networks, information theory, and decision theory, we develop a formal theory according to which causal representations reflect a trade-off between compression and informativeness, where the optimal trade-off depends on the decision-theoretic value of information for a given agent in a given context. This theory predicts that, all (...) else being equal, agents prefer causal models that are as compressed as possible. When compression is associated with information loss, however, all else is not equal, and our theory predicts that agents will favor compressed models only when the information they sacrifice is not informative with respect to the agent’s anticipated decisions. We then show, across six studies reported here (N=2,364) and one study reported in the supplemental materials (N=182), that participants’ preferences over causal models are in keeping with the predictions of our theory. Our theory offers a unification of different dimensions of causal evaluation identified within the philosophy of science (proportionality and stability), and contributes to a more general picture of human cognition according to which the capacity to create compressed (causal) representations plays a central role. (shrink)

For a stable visual world, the colours of objects should appear the same under different lights. This property of colour constancy has been assumed to be fundamental to vision, and many experimental attempts have been made to quantify it. I contend here, however, that the usual methods of measurement are either too coarse or concentrate not on colour constancy itself, but on other, complementary aspects of scene perception. Whether colour constancy exists other than in nominal terms remains unclear.

This paper consider Prior's connective Tonk from a particular bilateralist perspective. I show that there is a natural perspective from which we can see Tonk and its ilk as perfectly well-defined pieces of vocabulary; there is no need for restrictions to bar things like Tonk.

in Robin Le Poidevin (ed.) Being: Developments in Contemporary Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peter van Inwagen claims that there are no tables or chairs. He also claims that sentences such as ‘There are chairs here’, which seem to imply their existence, are often true. This combination of views opens van Inwagen to a charge of self-contradiction. I explain the charge, and van Inwagen’s response to it, which involves the claim that sentences like ‘There are tables’ shift their truth-conditions between (...) different contexts of utterance. I present an alternative response which involves the negation of that claim, and argue that it is preferable to van Inwagen’s. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

Cartwright attempts to argue from an analysis of the composition of forces, and more generally the composition of laws, to the conclusion that laws must be regarded as false. A response to Cartwright is developed which contends that properly understood composition poses no threat to the truth of laws, even though agreeing with Cartwright that laws do not satisfy the "facticity" requirement. My analysis draws especially on the work of Creary, Bhaskar, Mill, and points towards a general rejection of Cartwright's (...) view that laws, especially fundamental laws, should be seen as false. (shrink)

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation, may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering (...) an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot. (shrink)

Many people believe that for someone to now be responsible for some past action, the agent of that action and the responsible agent now must be one and the same person. In other words, many people that moral responsibility presupposes numerical personal identity. In this paper, I show why this platitude is false. I then suggest an account of what actual metaphysical relationship moral responsibility presupposes instead.

It is commonly acknowledged that, in order to test a theoretical hypothesis, one must, in Duhem' s phrase, rely on a "theoretical scaffolding" to connect the hypothesis with something measurable. Hypothesis-confirmation, on this view, becomes a three-place relation: evidence E will confirm hypothesis H only relative to some such scaffolding B. Thus the two leading logical approaches to qualitative confirmation--the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) account and Clark Glymour' s bootstrap account--analyze confirmation in relative terms. But this raises questions about the philosophical interpretation (...) of the technical conditions these accounts describe. What does it mean to say that E confirms H "relative to B"? How should we interpret the relation we are trying to analyze? (shrink)

Each new decade brings ‘advances’ in technology that are more capable of collecting, aggregating, organizing, and deploying data about human practices. Where we go, what we buy, what we say online, and the people with whom we connect, are captured with ever more sophistication by governmental and corporate institutions. Data are increasingly being sold to schools to help them ‘manage’ teaching and administration tasks. Of course, at the same time, schools, teachers, and students are generating data that further advances the (...) goals of data aggregators. After some discussion regarding data’s philosophical dimensions, this chapter examines the benefits and drawbacks of surveillance and datafication in present educational contexts. In addition, this chapter raises ethical and pragmatic questions related to how datafication often reshapes or redefines agency, choice, personal relationships, and individuality. In response to some of the ethical qualms raised by these questions, a vision (imaginary) is proposed to help conserve some of the educational values threatened by datafication, including values related to genuine interest, sociality, and transformative, and qualitative experiences. -/- CITATION: Hildebrand, D.L. (2024). What are Data and Who Benefits?. In: Buch, A., Lindberg, Y., Cerratto Pargman, T. (eds) Framing Futures in Postdigital Education. Postdigital Science and Education . Springer, Cham. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-58622-4_5 -/- . (shrink)

To what extent are experiences of powerlessness explained as involving a loss of control, and to what extent are attempts to increase patients’ control suitable as means of addressing these experiences? In this paper, I present some findings from a recent project in the phenomenology of powerlessness to argue that in response to experiences of powerlessness, the ideal of control has limited use in either a diagnostic or therapeutic function.

The Meno includes some of Plato’s best known epistemological puzzles and theories, as well as classic discussions of so called Socratic ethics. It also includes important examples from mathematics and an argument that the soul exists before birth – topics which, as far as we can tell, did not especially interest the historical Socrates. Because it discusses these topics without presenting bold metaphysical claims about the forms, it is often considered a “transitional dialogue,” coming between Plato’s (allegedly) early, Socratic dialogues (...) and his bolder middle-period dialogues. This chapter presents an alternative, explaining why the Meno discusses the topics that it does, not in terms of Plato’s development, but rather in terms of its portrayal of Meno and portrayal of Socrates’ strategy for engaging with Meno. Plato presents Meno as someone interested in philosophical topics, but not as an intellectual in his own right. He is deferential to people he views as wise; one of Socrates’ main goals is to get Meno to investigate on his own, rather than to simply rely on the (supposed) wisdom of others. At the same time, Socrates tries to convince Meno to change his ethical views and, along with this, his behavior. I argue that the end of the dialogue shows Socrates exploring a genuine tension in his own views about virtue and its teachability, thereby illustrating how those without knowledge can investigate on their own. (shrink)

One usually considers that pre-Aristotelian thought had little interest in economic problems. In reality, various authors from the end of the 5th or beginning of the 4th century BC (Ps.-Xenophon, Plato, Xenophon, Phaleas of Chalcedon) paid particular attention to these questions when they developed their political thought. Although their ideas differ in detail, they all share the same distrust of trade and monetary economy. These thinkers develop, from a certain number of (aristocratic) political presuppositions, a strong and detailed critique of (...) the economic transformations of which they are contemporary. The importance that Plato, in particular, attaches to economic realities appears in his harsh criticism of Athenian democracy, as well as in his political constructions of the Republic, the Critias and the Timaeus, or the Laws. By alternating a general approach and a detailed one (because the importance of the economy, in Plato, is also revealed in apparently minor details), we propose to show the fundamental importance of economic reflections in classical Greek thought, even before the Stagirite. (shrink)

Color-vision defects constitute a spectrum of disorders with varying degrees and types of departure from normal human color vision. One form of color-vision defect is dichromacy; by mixing together only two lights, the dichromat can match any light, unlike normal trichromatic humans, who need to mix three. In a philosophical context, our titular question may be taken in two ways. First, it can be taken at face value as a question about visible properties of external objects, and second, it may (...) be interpreted as the more intangible question of “what it’s like” to be color-blind. (shrink)

The Qualitative Thesis says that if you leave open P, then you are sure of if P, then Q just in case you are sure of the corresponding material conditional. We argue the Qualitative Thesis provides compelling reasons to accept a thesis that we call Conditional Locality, which says, roughly, the interpretation of an indicative conditional depends, in part, on the conditional’s local embedding environment. In the first part of the paper, we present an argument—due to Ben Holguín—showing that, without (...) Conditional Locality, the Qualitative Thesis is in tension with a margin for error principle on rational sureness. We show Conditional Locality reconciles the Qualitative Thesis with the margin for error principle. In the second part, we argue the full range of data supports what we call the Strong Qualitative Thesis. Without Conditional Locality, the Strong Qualitative Thesis has unacceptable consequences. But with Conditional Locality, it is tenable. (shrink)

The arguments of Fodor, Garret, Walker and Parkes [(1980) Against definitions, Cognition, 8, 263-367] are the source of widespread skepticism in cognitive science about lexical semantic structure. Whereas the thesis that lexical items, and the concepts they express, have decompositional structure (i.e. have significant constituents) was at one time "one of those ideas that hardly anybody [in the cognitive sciences] ever considers giving up" (p. 264), most researchers now believe that "[a]ll the evidence suggests that the classical [(decompositional)] view is (...) wrong as a general theory of concepts" [Smith, Medin & Rips (1984) A psychological approach to concepts: comments on Rey, Cognition, 17, 272], and cite Fodor et al. (1980) as "sounding the death knell for decompositional theories" [MacNamara & Miller (1989) Attributes of theories of meaning, Psychological Bulletin, 106, 360]. I argue that the prevailing skepticism is unmotivated by the arguments in Fodor et al. Fodor et al. misrepresent the form, function and scope of the decompositional hypothesis, and the procedures they employ to test for the psychological reality of definitions are flawed. I argue, further, that decompositional explanations of the phenomena they consider are preferable to their primitivist alternatives, and, hence, that there is prima facie reason to accept them as evidence for the existence of decompositional structure. Cognitive scientists would, therefore, do well to revert to their former commitment to the decompositional hypothesis. (shrink)

Externalism is the view that the intentional content of a mental state supervenes on its relations to objects in the extramental world. Nativism is the view that some of the innate states of the mind/brain have intentional content. I consider both “causal” and “nomic” versions of externalism, and argue that both are incompatible with nativism. I consider likely candidates for a compatibilist position – a nativism of “narrow” representational states, and a nativism of the contentless formal “vehicles” of representational states. (...) I argue that “narrow nativism” is either too implausible to appeal to the nativist – because it entails that innate representational states are lost as the mind becomes more experienced, or too costly to appeal to the externalist – because a reasonable version of it requires the analytic-synthetic distinction. Finally, I argue that “syntactic nativism” is indistinguishable from classical anti-nativist empiricism, given the latter’s broad tolerance for innate implementation of psychological principles and mechanisms. (shrink)

Realists about aesthetic judgment believe something like the following: for an aesthetic judgment of be correct, it must respond to the intrinsic aesthetic properties possessed by the object in question (e.g., Meskin et al., 2013; Kieran 2010). However, Cutting’s (2003) empirical research on aesthetic judgment puts pressure on that position. His work indicates that unconscious considerations extrinsic to an artwork can underpin said judgements. This paper takes Cutting’s conclusion a step further: If philosophers grant that it’s possible to appreciate artwork (...) on the basis of unconscious biases, then we never can be fully confident that our aesthetic judgment is undergirded by the intrinsic aesthetic properties of an artwork. Furthermore, if judgment on the basis of unconscious, external reasons cannot be ruled out, we cannot be confident that our aesthetic judgments are ‘correct’. I argue that Cutting’s research is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the extrinsic, unconscious factors that influence aesthetic judgment. Expectation bias formed via social influence and context greatly influence aesthetic judgments and are unavoidable: we inevitably form expectations based on all kinds of contextual cues independently of any actual exposure to the item in question. Such factors make it terribly difficult to be confident in our aesthetic judgments. Even if there are objective properties that mark out some items as aesthetically superior to others, we cannot be sure that our judgments are responding to those properties. (shrink)

We describe a strategy for integration of data that is based on the idea of semantic enhancement. The strategy promises a number of benefits: it can be applied incrementally; it creates minimal barriers to the incorporation of new data into the semantically enhanced system; it preserves the existing data (including any existing data-semantics) in their original form (thus all provenance information is retained, and no heavy preprocessing is required); and it embraces the full spectrum of data sources, types, models, and (...) modalities (including text, images, audio, and signals). The result of applying this strategy to a given body of data is an evolving Dataspace that allows the application of a variety of integration and analytic processes to diverse data contents. We conceive semantic enhancement (SE) as a lightweight and flexible process that leverages the richness of the structured contents of the Dataspace without adding storage and processing burdens to what, in the intelligence domain, will be an already storage- and processing-heavy starting point. SE works not by changing the data to which it is applied, but rather by adding an extra semantic layer to this data. We sketch how the semantic enhancement approach can be applied consistently and in cumulative fashion to new data and data-models that enter the Dataspace. (shrink)

Suppose Alice asserts p, and the Caterpillar wants to disagree. If the Caterpillar accepts classical logic, he has an easy way to indicate this disagreement: he can simply assert ¬p. Sometimes, though, things are not so easy. For example, suppose the Cheshire Cat is a paracompletist who thinks that p ∨ ¬p fails (in familiar (if possibly misleading) language, the Cheshire Cat thinks p is a gap). Then he surely disagrees with Alice's assertion of p, but should himself be unwilling (...) to assert ¬p. So he cannot simply use the classical solution. Dually, suppose the Mad Hatter is a dialetheist who thinks that p ∧ ¬p holds (that is, he thinks p is a glut). Then he may assert ¬p, but it should not be taken to indicate that he disagrees with Alice; he doesn't. So he too can't use the classical solution. The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, then, have a common problem, and philosophers with opinions like theirs have adopted a common solution to this problem: appeal to denial. Denial, these philosophers suppose, is a speech act like assertion, but it is not to be understood as in any way reducing to assertion. Importantly, denial is something different from the assertion of a negation; this is what allows it to work even in cases where assertion of negation does not. Just as importantly, denial must express disagreement, since this is the job it's being enlisted to do. (shrink)

Many philosophers of mathematics are attracted by nominalism – the doctrine that there are no sets, numbers, functions, or other mathematical objects. John Burgess and Gideon Rosen have put forward an intriguing argument against nominalism, based on the thought that philosophy cannot overrule internal mathematical and scientific standards of acceptability. I argue that Burgess and Rosen’s argument fails because it relies on a mistaken view of what the standards of mathematics require.

Robbie Williams’ (2020) book The Metaphysics of Representation is the new leading edge of the program of naturalizing intentionality. Williams brings sophistica.

What role, if any, should our moral intuitions play in moral epistemology? We make, or are prepared to make, moral judgments about a variety of actual and hypothetical situations. Some of these moral judgments are more informed, reflective, and stable than others (call these ourconsideredmoral judgments); some we make more confidently than others; and some, though not all, are judgments about which there is substantial consensus. What bearing do our moral judgments have on philosophical ethics and the search for first (...) principles in ethics? Should these judgments constrain, or be constrained by, philosophical theorizing about morality? On the one hand, we might expect first principles to conform to our moral intuitions or at least to our considered moral judgments. After all, we begin the reflection that may lead to first principles from particular moral convictions. And some of our moral intuitions (e.g., that genocide is wrong) are more fixed and compelling than any putative first principle. If so, we might expect common moral beliefs to have an important evidential role in the construction and assessment of first principles. On the other hand, common moral beliefs often rest on poor information, reflect bias, or are otherwise mistaken. We often appeal to moral principles to justify our particular moral convictions or to resolve our disagreements. Insofar as this is true, we may expect first principles to provide a foundation on the basis of which to test common moral beliefs and, where necessary, form new moral convictions. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider Noël Carroll’s Content Theory (CT) (2015) and argue that a key problem with CT is that it can be interpreted in two distinct ways: as a descriptive theory of aesthetic experience and as a normative prescriptive theory. Although CT is presented as a descriptive theory of experience, much of what Carroll says implies that CT can also be understood as a theory about how one ought to look at artworks. We argue that when understood as (...) a descriptive theory, CT fails to qualify as a meaningful theory of aesthetic experience. We then interpret the theory prescriptively. Ultimately, this second interpretation is also found lacking: if the aim of the theory is to instruct one on how to view art, it is no longer an attempt to characterize the experience of art. We conclude by arguing that the main flaw in CT is its approach: we cannot meaningfully characterize an experience by enumerating the objects that supposedly cause said experience, and any theory that takes such an approach is likely to be unsuccessful. (shrink)