This is the report on the XVI BRAZILIAN LOGIC CONFERENCE (EBL 2011) held in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between May 9–13, 2011 published in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic Volume 18, Number 1, March 2012. -/- The 16th Brazilian Logic Conference (EBL 2011) was held in Petro ́polis, from May 9th to 13th, 2011, at the Laboratório Nacional de Computação o Científica (LNCC). It was the sixteenth in a series of conferences that started in 1977 with the aim of (...) congregating logicians from Brazil and abroad, furthering interest in logic and its applications, stimulating cooperation, and contributing to the development of this branch of science. EBL 2011 included more than one-hundred and fifty participants, all of them belonging to prominent research institutes from Brazil and abroad, especially Latin America. The conference was sponsored by the Academia Brasileira de Ciências (ABC), the As- sociation for Symbolic Logic (ASL), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Sciences (CLE), Laboratório Nacional de Computação o Científica (LNCC), Pontif ́ıcia Universidade Cato ́lica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC- Rio), Sociedade Brasileira de Lógica (SBL), and Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). Funding was provided by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient ́ıfico e Tecnolo ́ gico (CNPq), Fundac ̧a ̃o de Amparo `a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), Fundação Euclides da Cunha (FEC), and Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). The members of the Scientific Committee were: Mário Folhadela Benevides (COPPE- UFRJ), Fa ́bio Bertato (CLE-IFCH-UNICAMP), Jean-Yves Béziau (UFRJ), Ricardo Bianconi (USP), Juliana Bueno-Soler (UFABC), Xavier Caicedo (Universidad de Los An- des), Walter Carnielli (CLE-IFCH-UNICAMP), Oswaldo Chateaubriand Filho (PUC-Rio), Marcelo Esteban Coniglio (CLE-IFCH-UNICAMP), Newton da Costa (UFSC, President), Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa (UFRG), Alexandre Costa-Leite (UnB), I ́tala M. Loffredo D’Ottaviano (CLE-IFCH-UNICAMP), Marcelo Finger (USP), Edward Hermann Haeusler (PUC-Rio), Décio Krause (UFSC), João Marcos (UFRN), Ana Teresa de Castro Martins (UFC), Maria da Paz Nunes de Medeiros (UFRN), Francisco Miraglia (USP), Luiz Car- los Pereira (PUC-Rio and UFRJ), Elaine Pimentel (UFMG), and Samuel Gomes da Silva (UFBA). The members of the Organizing Committee were: Anderson de Araujo (UNICAMP), Walter Carnielli (CLE-IFCH-UNICAMP), Oswaldo Chateaubriand Filho (PUC-Rio, Co- chair), Marcelo Correa (UFF), Renata de Freitas (UFF), Edward Hermann Haeusler (PUC- RJ), Hugo Nobrega (COPPE-UFRJ), Luiz Carlos Pereira (PUC-Rio e IFCS/UFRJ), Leandro Suguitani (UNICAMP), Rafael Testa (UNICAMP), Leonardo Bruno Vana (UFF), and Petrucio Viana (UFF, Co-chair). (shrink)

PREMISSA No século XIX, ocorreram transformações impulsionadas pela emergência de novas fontes energéticas (água e petróleo), por novos ramos industriais e pela alteração profunda nos processos produtivos, com a introdução de novas máquinas e equipamentos. Depois de 300 anos de exploração por parte das nações europeias, iniciou -se, principalmente nas colônias latino-americanas, um processo intenso de lutas pela independência. É no século XIX, já com a consolidação do sistema capitalista na Europa, que se encontra a herança intelectual mais próxima da (...) qual surgirá a Sociologia como ciência particular. No início desse século, as ideias do Conde de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), de Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), de David Ricardo (1772-1823) e de Charles Darwin (1809-1882), entre outros, foram o elo para que Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Karl Marx (1818 -1883) e Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), entre outros, desenvolvessem reflexões sobre a sociedade de seu tempo. Auguste Comte e Karl Marx foram os pensadores que lançaram as bases do pensamento sociológico e de duas grandes tradições – a positivista e a socialista – que muito influenciaram o desenvolvimento da Sociologia no Brasil. 1 AUGUSTE COMTE E A TRADIÇÃO POSITIVISTA Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte nasceu em Montpellier, na França, em 19 de janeiro de 1798. Com 16 anos de idade, ingressou na Escola Politécnica de Paris, fato que teria significativa influência na orientação posterior de seu pensamento. De 1817 a 1824, foi secretário do Conde de Saint-Simon. Comte declarou que, com Saint -Simon, aprendeu muitas coisas que jamais encontraria nos livros e que, no pouco tempo em que conviveu com o conde, fez mais progressos do que faria em muitos anos, se estivesse sozinho. Toda a obra de Comte está permeada pelos acontecimentos que ocorreram após a Revolução Francesa de 1789. Ele defendeu parte dos princípios revolucionários e criticou a restauração da monarquia, preocupando-se fundamentalmente em reorganizar a sociedade, que, no seu entender, estava em ebulição e mergulhada no caos. Para Comte, a desordem e a anarquia imperavam em virtude da confusão de princípios (metafísicos e teológicos), que não se adequavam à sociedade industrial em expansão. Era, portanto, necessário superar esse estado de coisas, usando a razão como fundamento da nova sociedade. Propôs, então, a mudança da sociedade por meio da reforma intelectual plena das pessoas. De acordo com o pensador, com a modificação do pensamento humano, por meio do método científico, que ele chamava de “filosofia positiva”, haveria uma reforma das instituições. Com a proposta do estudo da sociedade por meio da análise de seus processos e estruturas, e da reforma prática das instituições, Comte criou uma nova ciência, à qual deu o nome de “física social”, passando a chamá-la posteriormente de Sociologia. A Sociologia representava, para Comte, o coroamento da evolução do conhecimento, mediante o emprego de métodos utilizados por outras ciências, que buscavam conhecer os fenômenos constantes e repetitivos da natureza: a observação, a experimentação, a comparação e a classificação. De acordo com esse pensador, a Sociologia, como as ciências naturais, deve sempre procurar a reconciliação entre os aspectos estáticos e os dinâmicos do mundo natural ou, no caso da sociedade humana, entre a ordem e o progresso. O lema da “filosofia positiva” proposta por Comte era “conhecer para prever, prever para prover”, ou seja, o conhecimento é necessário para fazer previsões e também para solucionar possíveis problemas. A influência de Comte no desenvolvimento da Sociologia foi marcante, sobretudo, na escola francesa, evidenciando-se em Émile Durkheim e seus contemporâneos e seguidores. Seu pensamento esteve presente em muitas das tentativas de criar tipologias para explicar a sociedade. Suas principais obras são: Curso de filosofia positiva (1830-1842), Discurso sobre o espírito positivo (1848), Catecismo positivista (1852) e Sistema de política positiva (1854). Para concluirmos, Comte explanava que para a superação da anarquia reinante na nova sociedade industrial, a filosofia positivista defendia a subordinação do progresso à ordem. O mesmo era contra o retorno de Luís XVIII ao trono: em sua concepção, a sociedade industrial que emergia requeria um governo fundado na razão. 2 A TRADIÇÃO SOCIALISTA: KARL MARX E FRIEDRICH ENGELS Karl Heinrich Marx nasceu em Tréveris, na antiga Prússia, hoje Alemanha, em 1818 e, em 1830, ingressou no Liceu Friedrich Wilhelm, nessa mesma cidade. Anos depois, foi cursar Direito na Universidade de Bonn, transferindo-se para Berlim em seguida. Pouco a pouco, entretanto, seus interesses migraram para a Filosofia, área na qual defendeu, em 1841, a tese de doutorado A diferença da filosofia da natureza em Demócrito e Epicuro. Sua vida universitária foi marcada pelo debate político e intelectual influenciado pelo pensamento de Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) e, principalmente, pelo de Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770- 1831). Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) nasceu em Barmen (Renânia), na antiga Prússia, hoje Alemanha, filho mais velho de um rico industrial do ramo têxtil. Terminou sua formação secundária em 1837 e a partir de então sua formação intelectual foi por conta própria (autodidata), com alguns cursos universitários esparsos e de curta duração. Desde cedo começou a trabalhar nas empresas de seu pai e foi nessa condição que se deslocou para Bremen por três anos e depois foi enviado pelos pais a Manchester, na Inglaterra, onde trabalhou nas fábricas da família. Engels ficou impressionado com a miséria na qual viviam os trabalhadores das fábricas inglesas. Os dois, Marx e Engels, se encontraram em 1842, quando Marx passou a escrever para A Gazeta Renana, jornal da província de Colônia, do qual Engels era colaborador e mais tarde editor-chefe. O jornal, que criticava o poder prussiano, foi fechado em 1843, e Marx se viu desempregado. Ao perder o emprego, mudou-se para Paris, na França. Ali escreveu, em 1844, os Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos (só publicados em 1932) e, junto com F. Engels, o livro A sagrada família. Por sua vez, F. Engels, em 1844, decidiu voltar para a Alemanha, onde publicou, em 1845, A situação da classe trabalhadora na Inglaterra. Entre 1845 e 1847, Marx exilou-se em Bruxelas, na Bélgica, onde escreveu A ideologia alemã (em parceria com Friedrich Engels) e Miséria da filosofia (1847), obra na qual criticou o filósofo Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Em 1848, ainda na Bélgica, a parceria com Engels se solidificou ao escreverem juntos o livreto O Manifesto Comunista. Em 1848, Marx foi expulso da Bélgica e retornou a Colônia, na Alemanha (Prússia), sempre pensando na possibilidade de uma mudança estrutural em sua terra natal. Isso, entretanto, não aconteceu e Marx foi expulso da Alemanha em 1849, ano em que migrou para Londres, na Inglaterra, onde permaneceu até o fim da vida. Lá escreveu O 18 Brumário de Luís Bonaparte (1852), sua mais importante obra de reflexão sobre a vida política europeia do século XIX, desenvolveu pesquisas e concluiu seu maior trabalho: O capital: crítica da economia política. O primeiro volume dessa obra foi publicado em 1867; os outros três, em 1885, 1894 e 1905, após a morte de Marx, revisados por F. Engels. 2.1 O contexto histórico e a obra de Marx e Engels Para situar a obra de Marx e Engels, é necessário conhecer um pouco do que acontecia em meados do século XIX. Com as transformações que ocorriam no mundo ocidental, principalmente na esfera da produção industrial, houve um crescimento expressivo no número de trabalhadores industriais urbanos, com uma consequência evidente: precariedade da vida dos operários nas cidades. As condições de trabalho no interior das fábricas eram péssimas. Os empregados eram superexplorados, alimentavam-se mal e trabalhavam em ambientes insalubres. Para enfrentar essa situação e tentar modificá-la, os trabalhadores passaram a se organizar em associações e sindicatos e a promover movimentos de reivindicação. Desenvolveu-se, então, uma discussão das condições sociais, políticas e econômicas para se definirem as possibilidades de intervenção nessa realidade. Desde o início do século XIX, muitos pensadores discutiram essas questões, nas perspectivas socialista e anarquista. Na Inglaterra podem ser citados, entre outros: William Godwin (1756-1836), Thomas Spence (1750-1814), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Robert Owen (1771-1858) e Thomas Hodgkin (1787-1866). Na França, destacaram-se Étienne Cabet (1788- 1856), Flora Tristan (1803-1844), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) e Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865). Marx e Engels levaram em conta esses pensadores, debatendo com alguns contemporâneos e criticando-os. Além disso, incorporaram a tradição da economia clássica inglesa, presente principalmente nas obras de Adam Smith e de David Ricardo. Pode-se dizer, portanto, que Marx e Engels desenvolveram seu trabalho com base na análise crítica da economia política inglesa, do socialismo utópico francês e da filosofia alemã. Esses dois autores não buscavam definir uma ciência específica para estudar a sociedade (como a Sociologia, para Auguste Comte) ou situar seu trabalho em um campo científico particular. Em alguns escritos, Marx afirmou que a História seria a ciência que mais se aproximava de suas preocupações, por abarcar as múltiplas dimensões da sociedade, a qual deveria ser analisada na totalidade, não havendo uma separação rígida entre os aspectos sociais, econômicos, políticos, ideológicos, religiosos, culturais etc. O objetivo de Marx e Engels era estudar criticamente a sociedade capitalista com base em seus princípios constitutivos e em seu desenvolvimento, visando dotar a classe trabalhadora de uma análise política da sociedade de seu tempo. Assim, a tradição socialista nascida da luta dos trabalhadores, muitos anos antes e em situações diferentes, tem como expressão intelectual o pensamento de Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels. Para entender as concepções fundamentais de Marx e Engels é necessário fazer a conexão entre as lutas da classe trabalhadora, suas aspirações e as ideias revolucionárias que estavam presentes no século XIX na Europa. Para eles, o conhecimento científico da realidade só tem sentido quando visa à transformação dessa mesma realidade. A separação entre teoria e prática não é discutida, pois a “verdade histórica” não é algo abstrato e que se define teoricamente; sua verificação está na prática. Apesar de haver algumas diferenças em seus escritos, os elementos essenciais do pensamento de Marx e Engels podem ser assim sintetizados: • historicidade das ações humanas – crítica ao idealismo alemão; • divisão social do trabalho e o surgimento das classes sociais – a luta de classes; • o fetichismo da mercadoria e o processo de alienação; • crítica à economia política e ao capitalismo; • transformação social e revolução; • utopia – sociedade comunista. A obra desses dois autores é muito vasta e não ficou vinculada estritamente aos movimentos sociais dos trabalhadores. Pouco a pouco foi introduzida nas universidades como parte do estudo em diferentes áreas do conhecimento. Estudiosos de Filosofia, Sociologia, Ciência Política, Economia, História e Geografia, entre outras áreas, foram influenciados por ela. Na Sociologia, como afirma Irving M. Zeitlin, no livro Ideología y teoría sociológica, tanto Max Weber quanto Émile Durkheim fizeram, em suas obras, um debate com as ideias de Karl Marx. Pelas análises da sociedade capitalista de seu tempo e a repercussão que tiveram em todo o mundo, principalmente no século XX, nos movimentos sociais e nas universidades, Marx e Engels são considerados autores clássicos da Sociologia. No campo dessa disciplina, porém, o pensamento deles ficou um pouco restrito, pois perdeu aquela relação entre teoria e prática (práxis), ou seja, entre a análise crítica e a prática revolucionária. Essa relação esteve presente, por exemplo, na vida e na obra dos russos Vladimir Ilitch Ulianov, conhecido como Lênin (1870-1924), e Leon D. Bronstein, conhecido como Trotsky (1879-1940), da alemã Rosa Luxemburgo (1871-1919) e do italiano Antonio Gramsci (1891- 1937), que tiveram significativa influência no movimento operário do século XX. Com base no trabalho de Marx e Engels, muitos autores desenvolveram estudos acadêmicos em vários campos do conhecimento. Podemos citar, por exemplo, Georg Lukács (1885-1971), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), Lucien Goldmanm (1913 -1970), Louis Althusser (1918 -1990), Nikos Poulantzas (1936-1979), Edward P. Thompson (1924-1993) e Eric Hobsbawm (1917 -2012). O pensamento de Marx e Engels continua, assim, presente em todo o mundo, com múltiplas tendências e variações, sempre gerando controvérsias. REFERENCIAL TEÓRICO GEMKOW, H.; PSUA, I. M. L. Marx e Engels: Vida e Obra. São Paulo: Alfa e Ômega, 1984. 232 pp. GIANOTTI, J. A. Comte. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1978. 318 pp. (Col. Os Pensadores) KONDER, L. Marx: vida e obra. 7ª ed. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2007. 154 pp. (Col. Vida e Obra). (shrink)

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

Moral naturalists are often said to have trouble making sense of inter-communal moral disagreements. The culprit is typically thought to be the naturalist’s metasemantics and its implications for sameness of meaning across communities. The most familiar incarnation of this metasemantic challenge is the Moral Twin Earth argument. We address the challenge from the perspective of analytic naturalism, and argue that making sense of inter-communal moral disagreement creates no special issues for this view.

This document gathers together, in summary form, objections scattered across many papers and multiple online databases. Nevertheless, it omits some objections, notably complicated ones.

ABSTRACT This paper compares Spinoza with Daniel Dennett and uncovers a number of striking parallels. Genevieve Lloyd’s recent work on Spinoza reveals a picture of a philosopher that anticipated many of Dennett’s later ideas. Both share a fervent opposition to Descartes’ conception of mind and body and endorse a strikingly similar naturalist philosophy. It is the goal of this paper to tease out these connections and once again highlight the richness of a Spinozist lens of the world.

This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and modeling practices, more radical conclusions follow from this recognition than have previously been inferred. Going against the tendency within the literature to generalize from single models, I explicate and defend the following two core theses: any successful analysis of models must target sets of (...) models, their multiplicity of functions within science, and their scientific context and history and for almost any aspect x of phenomenon y, scientists require multiple models to achieve scientific goal z. (shrink)

This paper identifies three positions on the relationship between language and experience, the third of which I was not acquainted with before from my reading. It seems absurd.

Comparativism is the view that comparative confidences (e.g., being more confident that P than that Q) are more fundamental than degrees of belief (e.g., believing that P with some strength x). In this paper, I outline the basis for a new, non-probabilistic version of comparativism inspired by a suggestion made by Frank Ramsey in `Probability and Partial Belief'. I show how, and to what extent, `Ramseyan comparativism' might be used to weaken the (unrealistically strong) probabilistic coherence conditions that comparativism traditionally (...) relies on. (shrink)

This essay offers some reflections on Samir Okasha’s new monograph Agents and Goals in Evolution, his style of doing philosophy, and the broader philosophy of nature project of trying to make sense of agency and rationality as natural phenomena.

Recognizing the variety of dystopian science-fiction novels and movies, from Brave New World to Gattaca and more recently Star Trek, on the future of humanity in which eugenic policies are implemented, genetic engineering has been getting a bad reputation for valid but arguably, mostly historical reasons. In this paper, I critically examine the claim from Mehlman & Botkin (1998: ch. 6) that human enhancement will inevitably accentuate existing inequality in a free market and analyze whether prohibition is the optimal public (...) policy for this objection as egalitarians might advise (Lamont and Favor, 2014). (shrink)

Attributions of certain speech-acts, like dog-whistling and wolf-crying, have an interesting complementary and antagonistic relationship that creates a kind of hostile dialectic and emergent divergence in political discourse. In the following, we will show how the wolf-cry and the dog-whistle are both epistemically difficult speech-acts to attribute, leading to asymmetric uncertainties in attribution. These uncertainties cause the attribution of wolf-cries and dog-whistles themselves to often be both reasonable but unconfirmable epistemic claims. Then, we will show how these patterns of attributions (...) can lead to a reciprocal dialectic of entrenched and self-amplifying dog-whistling versus wolf-crying, until an unhappy status quo is developed. This leads to a number of problems, including an epistemic standoff of standpoints, the attribution saturation of the political discourse, and a condition of self-defeating truth-seeking. Seemingly, the only surefire solution is a unanimous alleviation of such attributions, a standard that may seem insurmountable, though other options can be considered. (shrink)

Various thinkers have been attempting to align artificial intelligence (AI) with ethics (Christian, 2020; Russell, 2021), the so-called problem of alignment, but some suspect that the problem may be intractable (Yampolskiy, 2023). In the following, we make an argument by analogy to analyze the possibility that the problem of alignment could be intractable. We show how the Tri-Omni properties in theology can direct us towards analogous properties for artificial superintelligence, Tri-Opti properties. However, just as the Tri-Omni properties are vulnerable to (...) metaphysical incompatibility, we will show that the Tri-Opti properties are vulnerable to a corresponding physical incompatibility, because optimal physical systems exist on the Pareto Frontier. We will explain that, while Tri-Omni incompatibility thus seems metaphysically soluble, the Tri-Opti incompatibility seems physically insoluble due to the constraints of multi-variable optimization. Finally, we will provide some scenarios by which this incompatibility may be realized. Besides for the primary purpose of its theoretical considerations, this analysis has the secondary interdisciplinary purpose of communicating to the theologically literate the potential importance of AI safety work, and the gesturing towards the possibility of the collaboration in both fields on topics in ethics, epistemology, and ontology. (shrink)

Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson (...) and Griffiths [J Med Philos 42(4):447–466, 2017], however, may bear the seeds for the revival of purely naturalist approach to health and disease. In this paper, I defend their idea of Biological Normativity against recent criticism by Schwartz [J Med Philos Forum Bioethics Philos Med 42(4):485–502, 2017] and hope to help it flower into a revival of naturalist approaches in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to (...) make sense of them both as natural phenomena. (shrink)

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...) testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist account of (...) animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

Perceptual experience is often said to be transparent; that is, when we have a perceptual experience we seem to be aware of properties of the objects around us, and never seem to be aware of properties of the experience itself. This is a introspective fact. It is also often said that we can infer a metaphysical fact from this introspective fact, e.g. a fact about the nature of perceptual experience. A transparency theory fills in the details for these two facts, (...) and bridges the gap between them. We have three aims: to scrutinize Michael Tye’s transparency theory :137–151, 2002; Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009; Philos Stud 170:39–57, 2014a), introduce a new transparency theory, and advance a meta-theoretical hypothesis about the interest, and import, of transparency theories. (shrink)

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c ) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal consciousness by drawing on the resources of state-based behavioral life history theory. By (...) comparing the different life histories of gastropods and arthropods, we will be able to make better sense of the possible origins of consciousness and its function for organisms in their natural environments. (shrink)

Imagine a world where everyone is healthy, intelligent, long living and happy. Intuitively this seems wonderful albeit unrealistic. However, recent scienti c breakthroughs in genetic engineering, namely CRISPR/Cas bring the question into public discourse, how the genetic enhancement of humans should be evaluated morally. In 2001, when preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), enabled parents to select between multiple embryos, Julian Savulescu introduced the principle of procreative bene cence (PPB), stating that parents have the obligations to choose (...) the child that is expected to have the best life. In this paper I argue that accepting the PPB and the consequentialist principle (CP) that two acts with the same consequences are morally on par, commits one to accepting the parental obligation of genetically enhancing one's children. (shrink)

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, owing much to the work of Havi Carel (2007, 2011, 2018). Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to (...) the phenomenology of animal health and suffering. This omission shall be remedied here, laying the groundwork for the phenomenological evaluation of animal health and suffering. (shrink)

As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, I shall (...) argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)

For decades Darwinian processes were framed in the form of the Lewontin conditions: reproduction, variation and differential reproductive success were taken to be sufficient and necessary. Since Buss and the work of Maynard Smith and Szathmary biologists were eager to explain the major transitions from individuals to groups forming new individuals subject to Darwinian mechanisms themselves. Explanations that seek to explain the emergence of a new level of selection, however, cannot employ properties that would already have to exist on that (...) level for selection to take place. Recently, Hammerschmidt et al. provided a ‘bottom-up’ experiment corroborating much of the theoretical work Paul Rainey has done since 2003 on how cheats can play an important role in the emergence of new Darwinian individuals on a multicellular level. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, I argue for a conceptual shift in perspective from seeing cheats as a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved for multi-cellularity to evolve to the very ‘key’ for the evolution of multicellularity. Secondly, I illustrate the consequences of this shift for both theoretical and experimental work, arguing for a more prominent role of ecology and the multi-level selection framework within the debate then they currently occupy. (shrink)

Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...) way forward: Paul Rainey and his collaborators have shown that Darwinian properties could be exogenously imposed via what they call “ecological scaffolding.” This could solve the “black box” dilemma faced by Darwinian explanations of new levels of organization. Yet, despite “scaffolding” recently becoming a popular term in the study of cognition, culture, and evolution, the concept has suffered from vagueness and ambiguity. This article aims to show that scaffolding can be turned into a proper scientific concept able to do explanatory work within the context of the major evolutionary transitions. Doing so will allow us to once again extend the scope of the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)

DRAFT In what follows, we will attempt to point out two technical loopholes in the proof of the “Impossibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiologies” as proposed by Gustaf Arrhenius (Arrhenius, 2000). The two problems arise from different principles, one from an application of the “Addition Principle” and one from an application of the “Dominance Principle” after a counterintuitive combination of the “No Repugnant/Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion” criteria, the former non-fatal and latter fatal. We will show that these problems arise via two methodologies. 1) (...) We appeal to intuitions with counterexample cases. 2) We replace ordinal priority-ordering with cardinal utility functions (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944). If correct, our critique shows that at least one avenue is available to welfarist axiology, which reopens the possibilities of the search for a “Theory X” (Parfit, 1984). DRAFT. (shrink)

Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models (...) in the science of morality has been vastly underappreciated. This omission shall be remedied here, offering a much more positive picture on the contributions modelers made to our understanding of morality. (shrink)

Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a continuity thesis regarding the function of metaphor across both domains, that is, metaphors fulfill any of the same functions in science as they (...) do in the arts. Importantly, this involves the claim that metaphors in arts as well as science have both epistemic and aesthetic functions. (shrink)

This article argues against Bowman Clarke's attempt to eliminate futurity from the God of Process.

If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and normativists about the concepts of (...) health and disease. In this paper, I defend and advocate the use of empirical methods to inform and advance this and other debates within the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

"Populism" has long been a dirty word. To some, it suggests the tyranny of the mob, to others, a xenophobic nativism. It is sometimes considered conducive to (if not simply identical to) fascism. In this timely book, Walter Horn acquits populism by "distilling" it, in order to finally give the people the power to govern themselves, free from constraints imposed either by conservatives (or libertarians) on the right or liberals (or Marxists) on the left. Beginning with explanations of what (...) it means to vote and what makes one society better off than another, Horn progresses to issues involving what makes for fair aggregation and appropriate, deliberative representation. From suggesting solutions to contemporary problems like gerrymandering, immigration control, and campaign finance, to offering answers to age-old questions like why dissenters should want to obey the majority and who should have the right to vote in various elections, Horn, using his new theory of "CHOICE Voluntarism," provides solutions to some of the most perplexing problems in the history of democratic theory. -/- The Introduction and first chapter can now be read free at Amazon. (shrink)

Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward (...) a natural philosophy of organic life. Explicitly repudiating "vitalism" (the notion that the laws of nature need to be modified when applied to living organisms), Elsasser argues instead that the structural complexity of even a single living cell is "transcomputational"--that is, beyond the power of any imaginable system to compute. Beginning from this insight, Elsasser leads the reader through a step-by-step process that ultimately arrives at the conclusion that living and non-living matter are separated by "a no-man's land of irrationality." Trained in Germany as a physicist, Elsasser first pondered the implications of quantum mechanics for biology as early as 1951. The more closely he studied the inherent complexity of life, the more skeptical he became of the reductionist view of organisms as tiny machines. "An organism," he concluded, "is a source of causal chains which cannot be traced beyond a terminal point because they are lost in the unfathomable complexity of the organism." Like the physicist who works within the bounds of an unfathomable universe, Elsasser argues, the biologist must seek answers within a system that is no less unfathomable. (shrink)

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a brilliant propaganda stroke against what is actually a useful way of thinking. Compared to the dangers of teleological thinking in biology, the dangers of agential thinking have unfortunately rarely (...) been discussed. Drawing on recent work by Samir Okasha, I attempt to remedy this omission, through analyzing the nature of agential thinking, and providing a philosophical treatment of the unexamined dangers in this peculiar, yet tempting way of thinking. (shrink)

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell’s (2020) (M&P) call for a more “‘inclusive”’ animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not.

This paper introduces new logical systems which axiomatize a formal representation of inconsistency (here taken to be equivalent to contradictoriness) in classical logic. We start from an intuitive semantical account of inconsistent data, fixing some basic requirements, and provide two distinct sound and complete axiomatics for such semantics, LFI1 and LFI2, as well as their first-order extensions, LFI1* and LFI2*, depending on which additional requirements are considered. These formal systems are examples of what we dub Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFI) (...) and form part of a much larger family of similar logics. We also show that there are translations from classical and paraconsistent first-order logics into LFI1* and LFI2*, and back. Hence, despite their status as subsystems of classical logic, LFI1* and LFI2* can codify any classical or paraconsistent reasoning. (shrink)

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

I argue that Kathleen Stock omits crucial information in her 2021 book Material Girls, when she debates with Thomas Laqueur, information which enables readers to appreciate the excitement in relation to his historical discovery. I argue further that this is more than just a communicational problem. I then present a reason for rejecting the theory Laqueur uncovers: the initially strange theory that there is just one sex. But I argue that the one sex theory is unlikely to be killed off (...) by this reason. I also raise a concern about Stock’s interpretation of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. The writing style here is influenced by an essay by a medic. (shrink)

While we agree in broad strokes with the characterisation of rationalization as a “useful fiction,” we think that Fiery Cushman's claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (1) the reality of beliefs and desires, that is, the fictional status of folk-psychological entities and (2) the degree to which they should be understood as useful. Our aim is to clarify both points and explicate the rationale of rationalization.

In a recent paper published in this journal, Hughes (2019) has argued that Machery’s (2017) Dogmatism Argument is self-defeating. Machery’s (2019) reply involves giving the Dogmatism Argument an inductive basis, rather than a philosophical basis. That is, he argues that the most plausible contenders in the epistemology of disagreement all support the Dogmatism Argument; and thus, it is likely that the Dogmatism Argument is true, which gives us reason to accept it. However, Machery’s inductive argument defines the leading views in (...) terms of their citation counts. But there is no necessary connection between citation counts and truth; it is a truism that many highly cited papers over the past century have turned out to contain false arguments. This inductive information should lead Machery to revise his argument; what Machery (2019) owes—but has failed to provide—is a positive argument for ruling out another plausible contender that Hughes (2019) raises. Without such an account, Machery’s inductive case for the Dogmatism Argument fails. (shrink)

This is a one page handout identifying some notable omissions from her brief history of gender identity theory.

Joe Horton’s all-or-nothing problem concerns a situation in which it is morally permissible to do nothing and to save two people but not to save only one. This description seems to entail that we should do nothing rather than save only one. I object to Horton’s solution and challenge a principle he draws attention to, which is required to generate the problem but which Horton regards as beyond dispute.

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)