Este artículo estudia la justificación normativa de la adopción de los ensayos clínicos aleatorizados por parte de las autoridades sanitarias británicas como estándar metodológico en 1946. A partir de un análisis de los distintos intereses de los participantes en el proceso (pacientes, médicos, farmacéuticas y el propio Estado) argumentamos que la aleatorización se adoptó como mecanismo de asignación imparcial de tratamientos, aunque sus propiedades estadísticas no fueran bien comprendidas. Tal justificación permanece aún vigente.

La renta básica se nos presenta en la obra de Philippe van Parijs como una propuesta política filosóficamente argumentada, de modo tal que convencerá tanto al teórico de la justicia como al ciudadano que votará su implantación. En este artículo analizamos la argumentación de van Parijs mostrando cómo la efectividad política de sus tesis sólo se sostiene a costa de reducir el debate sobre la renta básica a los términos de su propia concepción de la ética. Ponemos en duda, por (...) nuestra parte, el alcance de esta reducción sobre un doble plano: diluye por completo la dimensión prudencial de toda argumentación política, y no deja más alternativa que la educación sentimental para quienes no se dejen convencer por el equilibrio reflexivo. (shrink)

Over the last decade, philosophers of science have extensively criticized the epistemic superiority of randomized controlled trials for testing safety and effectiveness of new drugs, defending instead various forms of evidential pluralism. We argue that scientific methods in regulatory decision-making cannot be assessed in epistemic terms only: there are costs involved. Drawing on the legal distinction between rules and standards, we show that drug regulation based on evidential pluralism has much higher costs than our current RCT-based system. We analyze these (...) costs and advocate for evaluating any scheme for drug regulatory tests in terms of concrete empirical benchmarks, like the error rates of regulatory decisions. (shrink)

Did the impartiality of clinical trials play any role in their acceptance as regulatory standards for the safety and efficacy of drugs? According to the standard account of early British trials in the 1930s and 1940s, their impartiality was just rhetorical: the public demanded fair tests and statistical devices such as randomization created an appearance of neutrality. In fact, the design of the experiment was difficult to understand and the British authorities took advantage of it to promote their own particular (...) interests. I claim that this account is based on a poorly defined concept of experimental fairness . I present an alternative approach in which a test would be impartial if it incorporates warrants of non-manipulability. With this concept, I reconstruct the history of British trials showing that they were indeed fair and this fairness played a role in their acceptance as regulatory yardsticks. (shrink)

I will open the first part of this paper by trying to elucidate the frequentist foundations of RCTs. I will then present a number of methodological objections against the viability of these inferential principles in the conduct of actual clinical trials. In the following section, I will explore the main ethical issues in frequentist trials, namely those related to randomisation and the use of stopping rules. In the final section of the first part, I will analyse why RCTs were accepted (...) for regulatory purposes. I contend that their main virtue, from a regulatory viewpoint, is their impartiality, which is grounded in randomisation and fixed rules for the interpretation of the experiment. Thus the question will be whether Bayesian trials can match or exceed the achievements of frequentist RCTs in all these respects. In the second part of the paper, I will first present a quick glimpse of the introduction of Bayesianism in the field of medical experiments, followed by a summary presentation of the basic tenets of a Bayesian trial. The point here is to show that there is no such thing as “a” Bayesian trial. Bayesianism can ground many different approaches to medical experiments and we should assess their respective virtues separately. Thus I present two actual trials, planned with different goals in mind, and assess their respective epistemic, ethical and regulatory merits. In a tentative conclusion, I contend that, given the constraints imposed by our current regulatory framework, impartiality should preside over the design of clinical trials, even at the expense of many of their inferential and ethical virtues. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical paternalism is the normative stance upheld by pharmaceutical regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration. These agencies prevent patients from accessing treatments declared safe and ineffective for the patient’s good without their consent. Libertarian critics of the FDA have shown a number of significant flaws in regulatory paternalism. Against these objections, I will argue that, in order to make an informed decision about treatments, a libertarian patient should request full disclosure of the uncertainty about an experimental treatment. (...) But pharmaceutical markets, on their own, are not a reliable source of information about such uncertainty. And companies have the power to capture any independent expert who may assess it. Therefore, the libertarian is better off deferring on an independent regulatory body the assessment of the pharmaceutical risks, constraining access to treatments until tested. (shrink)

Political fact-checkers evaluate the truthfulness of politicians’ claims. This paper contributes to an emerging scholarly debate on whether fact-checkers treat political parties differently in a systematic manner depending on their ideology (bias). We first examine the available approaches to analyze bias and then present a new approach in two steps. First, we propose a logistic regression model to analyze the outcomes of fact-checks and calculate how likely each political party will obtain a truth score. We test our model with a (...) sample of fact-checks from Newtral, a major Spanish fact-checker. Our model would signal bias under two assumptions: a) all political parties are on average equally accurate in their statements; b) the verification method gives precise instructions and is implemented systematically. We investigate this second assumption with a series of interviews with Newtral fact-checkers. We show that standard verification protocols are so loosely implemented that fact-checks reflect a set of journalistic decisions, rather than a bias in the statistical sense. We call for a more rigorous definition of verification methods as a pre-requisite for an unbiased assessment of politician’s claims. (shrink)

In this paper, Isuggest that placebo effects, as we know them today, should be understood as experimental phenomena, low-level regularities whose causal structure is grasped through particular experimental designs with little theoretical guidance. Focusing on placebo interventions with needles for pain reduction -one of the few placebo regularities that seems to arise in meta-analytical studies- I discuss the extent to which it is possible to decompose the different factors at play through more fine-grained randomized clinical trials. My sceptical argument is (...) twofold. On the one hand, I argue that experiments alone are not enough to standardize interventions, and that it is necessary to include theories. On the other hand, I argue that the social interactions that seem to be part of placebo effects are difficult, if not impossible, to blind. Therefore, the measurement biases arising from the participants’ reactivity to the experimental setup cannot be controlled for. Further decomposition of placebo effects requires a theoretical account of the existing experimental regularities that may guide further tests. (shrink)

This paper discusses the so-called non-interference assumption (NIA) grounding causal inference in trials in both medicine and the social sciences. It states that for each participant in the experiment, the value of the potential outcome depends only upon whether she or he gets the treatment. Drawing on methodological discussion in clinical trials and laboratory experiments in economics, I defend the necessity of partial forms of blinding as a warrant of the NIA, to control the participants’ expectations and their strategic interactions (...) with the experimenter. (shrink)

Debiasing procedures are experimental methods aimed at correcting errors arising from the cognitive biases of the experimenter. We discuss two of these methods, the predesignation rule and randomization, showing to what extent they are open to the experimenter’s regress: there is no metarule to prove that, after implementing the procedure, the experimental data are actually free from biases. We claim that, from a contractarian perspective, these procedures are nonetheless defensible since they provide a warrant of the impartiality of the experiment: (...) we only need proof that the result has not been intentionally manipulated for prima facie acceptance. (shrink)

I want to expand the pragmatist view of probability advocated by Roberto Torretti, drawing on the propensity approach. In the first part, I will show how the concept of mathematical expectation originally formalized an Aristotelian principle of justice. In the second half, I will present the game-theoretic approach to probability developed by Shafer and Vovk, showing how it allows us to interpret the original normativity of mathematical expectations. I will finally discuss how this latter view contributes to a pragmatist understanding (...) of probability, as Torretti advocates, although with broader foundations than the physical symmetries of standard propensities. (shrink)

Why scientists reach an agreement on new experimental methods when there are conflicts of interest about the evidence they yield? I argue that debiasing methods play a crucial role in this consensus, providing a warrant about the impartiality of the outcome regarding the preferences of different parties involved in the experiment. From a contractarian perspective, I contend that an epistemic pre-requisite for scientists to agree on an experimental method is that this latter is neutral regarding their competing interests. I present (...) two medical experiments (on smallpox inoculation and Mesmerism) in which debiasing procedures such as blinding and data tabulation provided warrants of impartiality that made people agree on the experimental design even if they disagreed on the outcome. (shrink)

This article analyses how the French Academy of Sciences assessed Jaime Ferrán’s cholera vaccine submitted for the Prix Bréant in the 1880s. Ferrán, a Spanish independent physician, discovered the treatment in 1884 and tried it on thousands of patients during the cholera outbreak in Valencia the following year. His evaluation sparked a controversy in Spain and abroad on the vaccine’s efficacy. The Bréant jury did not see any evidence for it in Ferrán’s submission, a decision usually interpreted in terms of (...) French scientific nationalism (or simple chauvinism): an outsider from the scientific periphery could not be awarded the Bréant. Drawing on the archival records of the award, we suggest that Ferrán failed instead to provide data that the Academy could consider unbiased, according to the contemporary standards for data presentation. We will illustrate these standards at work in the assessment of another submission from Spain, by Philipp Hauser, who received the Bréant for the thoroughness of his statistical endeavour. (shrink)

I analyze cultural relativism as a methodological strategy to correct for ethnocentric biases in anthropological fieldwork. I discuss the format debiasing norms may adopt depending on whether a discipline has a causal or interpretative outlook. Franz Boas and his school advocated for an interpretative approach to ethnographic fieldwork, in which cultural relativism was implemented as a standard to be interpreted by expert third parties. Legitimate as it may be as a debiasing method, it does not allow anthropologists to adjudicate their (...) debates on biases in their ethnographic record. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an account of the normative dimension implicit in D. Bernoulli’s expected utility functions by means of an analysis of the juridical metaphors upon which the concept of mathematical expectation was moulded. Following a suggestion by the late E. Coumet, I show how this concept incorporated a certain standard of justice which was put in question by the St. Petersburg paradox. I contend that Bernoulli would have solved it by introducing an alternative normative criterion rather than (...) a positive model of decision making processes. (shrink)

In this paper I study how the theoretical categories of consumption theory were used by Milton Friedman in order to classify empirical data and obtain predictions. Friedman advocated a case by case definition of these categories that traded theoretical coherence for empirical content. I contend that this methodological strategy puts a clear incentive to contest any prediction contrary to our interest: it can always be argued that these predictions rest on a wrong classification of data. My conjecture is that this (...) methodological strategy can contribute to explain why Friedman’s predictions never generated the consensus he expected among his peers. (shrink)

In this paper I study Milton Friedman’s statistical education, paying special attention to the different methodological approaches (Fisher, Neyman and Savage) to which he was exposed. I contend that these statistical procedures involved different views as to the evaluation of statistical predictions. In this light, the thesis defended in Friedman’s 1953 methodological essay appears substantially ungrounded.

In this paper I explore a positivist methodological tradition in early demand theory, as exemplified by several common traits that I draw from the works of V. Pareto, H. L. Moore and H. Schultz. Assuming a current approach to explanation in the social sciences, I will discuss the building of their various explanans, showing that the three authors agreed on two distinctive methodological features: the exclusion of any causal commitment to psychology when explaining individual choice and the mandate to test (...) the truth of demand theory on aggregate data by statistical means. However, I also contend, from an epistemological point of view, that the truth of demand theory was conceived of in three different ways by our authors. Inspired by Poincaré, Pareto assumed that many different theories could account for the same data on individual choice, coming close to a kind of conventionalism -though I prefer to refer to this position as theoreticism. Moore was himself akin to Pearson's approach, which could be named descriptivist insofar as it resolved scientific laws into statistical descriptions of the data. Finally, Schultz tried to reconcile both approaches in an adequationist stance with no success, as we shall see. (shrink)

Exploramos aquí la conexión entre los conceptos de riesgo e igualdad en el argumento del observador imparcial. La concepción de la justicia que elegiría un observador imparcial se justifica por la pureza del procedimiento de elección. Sin embargo, si modelizamos esta decisión utilizando medidas del riesgo habituales en matemática financiera, veremos cómo el criterio de elección del observador bajo el velo de la ignorancia contiene una preferencia implícita por el grado de desigualdad resultante. Esto nos obliga a reconsiderar la pureza (...) procedimental de la elección. (shrink)

One of the defining features of the classical gene was its position. In molecular genetics, positions are defined instead as nucleotide numbers and there is no clear correspondence with its classical counterpart. However, the classical gene position did not simply disappear with the development of the molecular approach, but survived in the lab associated to different genetic practices. The survival of classical gene position would illustrate Waters’ view about the practical persistence of the genetic approach beyond reductionism and anti-reductionist claims. (...) We show instead that at the level of laboratory practices there are also reductive processes, operating through the rise and fall of different techniques. Molecular markers made the concept of classical gene position practically dispensable, leading us to rethink whether it had any causal role or was just a mere heuristic. (shrink)

During the 2010s, a radical transformation took place in the Spanish philosophical landscape: most philosophy journals started releasing their papers for free under a creative commons licence. Thanks to open access publication, Spanish philosophy has a bigger audience today than never before. Drawing on the authors’ experience as editors of two of these journals, Theoria and Recerca, this paper discusses what made this transformation possible, its consequences for the assessment of the Spanish philosophical output and, finally, how to strengthen Spanish (...) philosophy journals to confront the forthcoming challenges in open access publishing. (shrink)

Publishers are signing transformative agreements with different research institutions and funding bodies across the world. These agreements establish that the institution or funder makes a block payment in exchange for an annual quota of OA papers allowing their affiliated authors to publish OA in an agreed list of journals, at no extra cost to the individual author. This is a step towards the transformation of these journals into a Gold (commercial) Open Access regime. -/- In January 2023, the members of (...) the OA working group contacted the editors of the 27 journals listed as relevant for the field of philosophy of science on the website of the Philosophy of Science Association. We asked the editors-in-chief two questions: 1) Did your publishers discuss any plans to transition to gold open access exclusively with you? If so, how would it work? 2) If the publishers did contact you regarding this matter, what is your view on the project? -/- We collected 22 answers. The executive summary is: 10 of the 27 journals have started the transition to Gold Open Access, although many editors are not aware of this shift, but they wouldn’t support it, and many are actively against it. (shrink)

In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in life insurance (...) during the following two hundred years, in two different interpretations. The Domatian account of actuarial fairness relied on subjective uncertainty: An agreement on risk was fair if both parties were equally ignorant about the chances of an uncertain event. The objectivist version grounded any agreement on an objective risk estimate drawn from a mortality table. We will show how the objectivist approach collapsed in the market for life annuities during the 18th century, leaving open the question of why we still speak of actuarial fairness as if it were an objective expected value. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best definition is given through the success of a treatment in a clinical trial. We distinguish two types of disease-mongering according to the way they exploit the definition of the trial population for marketing purposes. We argue that behind these two forms of disease-mongering there are two well-known problems in the (...) statistical methodology of clinical trials (the reference class problem and the distinction between statistical and clinical significance). Overcoming them is far from simple. (shrink)

In this article we explore an argumentative pattern that provides a normative justification for expected utility functions grounded on empirical evidence, showing how it worked in three different episodes of their development. The argument claims that we should prudentially maximize our expected utility since this is the criterion effectively applied by those who are considered wisest in making risky choices (be it gamblers or businessmen). Yet, to justify the adoption of this rule, it should be proven that this is empirically (...) true: i.e. that a given function allows us to predict the choices of that particular class of agents. We show how expected utility functions were introduced and contested in accordance with this pattern in the 18th century and how it recurred in the 1950s when Allais made his case against the neo-Bernoullians. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

We discuss the role of practical costs in the epistemic justification of a novice choosing expert advice, taking as a case study the choice of an expert statistician by a lay politician. First, we refine Goldman’s criteria for the assessment of this choice, showing how the costs of not being impartial impinge on the epistemic justification of the different actors involved in the choice. Then, drawing on two case studies, we discuss in which institutional setting the costs of partiality can (...) play an epistemic role. This way we intend to show how the sociological explanation of the choice of experts can incorporate its epistemic justification. (shrink)

According to First-Person Realism, one's own first-person perspective on the world is metaphysically privileged in some way. After clarifying First-Person Realism by reference to parallel debates in the metaphysics of modality and time, I survey eight different arguments in favor of First-Person Realism.

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)

The unpleasantness of pain motivates action. Hence many philosophers have doubted that it can be accounted for purely in terms of pain’s possession of indicative representational content. Instead, they have explained it in terms of subjects’ inclinations to stop their pains, or in terms of pain’s imperative content. I claim that such “noncognitivist” accounts fail to accommodate unpleasant pain’s reason-giving force. What is needed, I argue, is a view on which pains are unpleasant, motivate, and provide reasons in virtue of (...) possessing content that is indeed indicative, but also, crucially, evaluative. (shrink)

The singularity hypothesis is a radical hypothesis about the future of artificial intelligence on which self-improving artificial agents will quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human. Despite the ambitiousness of its claims, the singularity hypothesis has been defended at length by leading philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper, I argue that the singularity hypothesis rests on scientifically implausible growth assumptions. I show how leading philosophical defenses of the singularity hypothesis (Chalmers 2010, Bostrom 2014) fail (...) to overcome the case for skepticism. I conclude by drawing out philosophical implications of this discussion for our understanding of consciousness, personal identity, digital minds, existential risk, and ethical longtermism. GPI Working Paper No . 19-2022. (shrink)

There is a difference between merely thinking that P and really grasping that P. For example, Jackson's (1982) black-and-white Mary cannot (before leaving her black-and-white room) fully grasp what it means to say that fire engines are red, but she can perfectly well entertain the thought that fire engines are red. The contrast between merely thinking and grasping is especially salient in the context of certain moral decisions. For example, an individual who grasps the plight of starving children thanks to (...) evocative images seems much more likely to donate for the children's benefit than someone who is merely told about their plight. This paper offers a phenomenal account of grasping according to which grasping a content (whether a proposition or concept) consists in one's thoughts about the content being constituted by phenomenal experiences of constituents of the content. This account improves on earlier phenomenal accounts of grasping (Bourget 2017a, 2018) by allowing for partial grasping and generalizing to concepts. The paper also addresses objections to phenomenal accounts of grasping, including the objection that recent developments in AI technology show that consciousness is irrelevant to grasping and understanding. (shrink)

Knowledge is widely thought to entail belief. But Radford has claimed to offer a counterexample: the case of the unconfident examinee. And Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel have claimed empirical vindication of Radford. We argue, in defense of orthodoxy, that the unconfident examinee does indeed have belief, in the epistemically relevant sense of dispositional belief. We buttress this with empirical results showing that when the dispositional conception of belief is specifically elicited, people’s intuitions then conform with the view that knowledge entails (dispositional) (...) belief. (shrink)

The question of whether Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) justifies the existence of metaphysical indeterminacy has recently come to the fore. Metaphysical indeterminacy has been argued to emerge from three sources: coherent superpositions, the indefinite number of branches in the quantum multiverse and the nature of these branches. This paper reviews the evidence and concludes that those arguments don’t rely on EQM alone and rest on metaphysical auxiliary assumptions that transcend the physics of EQM. We show how EQM can be ontologically (...) interpreted without positing metaphysical indeterminacy by adopting a deflationary attitude towards branches. Two ways of developing the deflationary view are then proposed: one where branches are eliminated, and another where they are reduced to the universal quantum state. (shrink)

4E approaches to affective technology tend to focus on how ‘users’ manage their situated affectivity, analogously to how they help themselves cognitively through epistemic actions or using artefacts and scaffolding. Here I focus on cases where the function of affective technology is to exploit or manipulate the agent engaging with it. My opening example is the cigarette, where technological refinements have harmfully transformed the affective process of consuming nicotine. I proceed to develop case studies of two very different but also (...) harmful affective technologies. Casinos and electronic gambling machines deploy computationally intensive scaffolding to shape the onset and continuation of gambling episodes. High-heeled shoes affectively engineer wearers’ relationships to their own embodied capacities and are predominantly expected to be worn by women. I conclude with a discussion of the need for study of affective technology to focus other-directed applications, some of which will serve competing or antagonistic interests. (shrink)

Presentism and Eternalism are competing views about the ontological and temporal structure of the world, introduced and demarcated by their answers to questions about what exists and whether what exists changes. The goal of this chapter is to give the reader a clear understanding of Presentism and Eternalism, and a sense of some considerations used to critically assess the views by briefly rehearsing some of the main philosophical problems facing them.

Epistemologists have recently proposed a number of norms governing rational inquiry. My aim in this paper is to unify and explain recently proposed norms of inquiry by developing a general account of the conditions under which inquiries are rational, analogous to theories such as evidentialism and reliabilism for rational belief. I begin with a reason-responsiveness conception of rationality as responding correctly to possessed normative reasons. I extend this account with a series of claims about the normative reasons for inquiry that (...) we possess. I apply the account to shed light on two classes of norms that have featured prominently in recent discussions: norms of clutter avoidance forbidding agents from engaging in trivial inquiries, and norms of logical non-omniscience governing properties such as the deductive closure and consistency of an agent's belief state. I conclude with a discussion of the sense in which norms of inquiry should be regarded as epistemic norms. (shrink)

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

This paper explores an initially attractive principle connecting beliefs in general with beliefs about what beliefs are rational. The principle turns out to be violated by intuitively rational beliefs in some situations. The paper lays out some options for reacting to this fact.

When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human (...) survival. I raise objections to the claim that respect for others’ risk attitudes requires risk avoidance when choosing for future generations. In particular, I argue that there is no known principle of interpersonal aggregation that yields acceptable results in variable population contexts and is consistent with a plausible ideal of respect for others’ risk attitudes in fixed population cases. GPI Working Paper No . 20-2022. (shrink)

Formally-inclined epistemologists often theorize about ideally rational agents--agents who exemplify rational ideals, such as probabilistic coherence, that human beings could never fully realize. This approach can be defended against the well-know worry that abstracting from human cognitive imperfections deprives the approach of interest. But a different worry arises when we ask what an ideal agent should believe about her own cognitive perfection (even an agent who is in fact cognitively perfect might, it would seem, be uncertain of this fact). Consideration (...) of this question reveals an interesting feature of the structure of our epistemic ideals: for agents with limited information, our epistemic ideals turn out to conflict with one another. (shrink)

It is conventional wisdom among political philosophers that ideal principles of justice must guide our attempts to design institutions to avert actual injustice. Call this the ideal guidance approach. I argue that this view is misguided— ideal principles of justice are not appropriate "guiding principles" that actual institutions must aim to realize, even if only approximately. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is also avoidable. In this paper, I develop an alternative approach to institutional design, which I call institutional failure analysis. The (...) basic intuition of this approach is that our moral assessment of institutional proposals is most effective when we proceed from a detailed understanding of the causal processes generating problematic social outcomes. Failure analysis takes the institutional primary design task to be obviating or averting institutional failures. Consequently, failure analysis enables theorists to prescribe more effective solutions to actual injustice because its focuses on understanding the injustice, rather than specifying an ideal of justice. (shrink)

There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. Many such claims have been made about the influence of such factors on our folk notion of causation. In this paper, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated, as they are based on one narrow type of data about a particular (...) type of causal cognition; the extant data do not warrant any wide-ranging conclusions about the pervasiveness of normative considerations in causal cognition. Of course, almost all empirical investigations involve some manner of ampliative inference, and so we provide novel empirical results demonstrating that there are types of causal cognition that do not seem to be influenced by moral considerations. (shrink)

This dialogue explores the question of whether intentionality—the “ofness”, “aboutness”, or “directedness” of mental states—is a relation. We explore three views: the Naive View, on which intentionality is a relation to ordinary, everyday objects, facts, and other such items; the Abstract Contents View, on which intentionality is a relation to mind-independent abstract entities that are our contents; and the Aspect View, on which intentionality is a matter of having intentional states with particular (non-relational) aspects that are our contents. We consider (...) the challenges facing these views, which include empirical challenges in accounting for all the contents our intentional states can represent, metaphysical challenges in making sense of how contents can be entertained or otherwise represented by us and how they can play a psychological role in the mental economy, and challenges in making sense of how intentionality connects us to the world—if at all. Along the way, we consider the question of how consciousness is related to intentionality and how this affects one’s choice of views. (shrink)

Longtermism is the thesis that in a large class of decision situations, the best thing we can do is what is best for the long-term future. The scope question for longtermism asks: how large is the class of decision situations for which this is true? In this paper, I suggest that the scope of longtermism may be narrower than many longtermists suppose. I identify a restricted version of longtermism: swamping axiological strong longtermism (swamping ASL). I identify three scope-limiting factors - (...) probabilistic and decision-theoretic phenomena which, when present, tend to reduce the prospects for swamping ASL. I argue that these scope-limiting factors are often present in human decision problems, then use two case studies from recent discussions of longtermism to show how the scope-limiting factors lead to a restricted, if perhaps nonempty, scope for swamping ASL. (shrink)

This is a corrected version of the final proofs. I've fixed a number of typos, and corrected a blunder in chapter 4. In chapter 4 I say that 'this is this' is analytic, and 'this is not this' is antonymous. This is inconsistent with what I say in chapter 5, and not what I actually think. Rather, 'this is this' is taugologous, and 'this is not this' is contradictory. Analyticity and autnonmy are sense properties while tautologousness and contradictoriness are formal (...) logical properties. Heading, ToC and Index updated accordingly. (Oxford will make these corrections in their online version and in future print runs.). (shrink)

Hylomorphists hold that substances are, in some sense, composites of matter and form. The form of a substance is typically taken to play a fundamental role in determining the unity or identity of the whole. Staunch hylomorphists think that this role is of a kind that precludes the ontological reduction of form to the physical and thus take their position to be inconsistent with physicalism. Forms, according to staunch hylomorphism, play a fundamental role in grounding their bearers’ proper parts and (...) that, it seems, rules out the physical grounding of form itself. I shall develop a physicalist version of hylomorphism that treats form as geometric structure and which, I shall argue, entails many of the central theses endorsed by staunch hylomorphists. Based on Shoemaker’s notion of conditional powers, I shall argue that the geometric structures of complex wholes are the conditions on at least some of the conditional powers of their bearers’ proper parts, transforming those powers into powers simpliciter. Thus, forms play a fundamental role in the dynamical evolution of the physical world, but without bestowing causal powers themselves and hence without violating the causal closure of the physical domain. If a substance’s proper parts are taken to be individuated by their powers simpliciter, then they derive their identities from their places in the substantial whole, which thus determines the identities of its proper parts without changing their intrinsic natures. (shrink)