Objective: There are benefits and risks of giving patients more granular control of their personal health information in electronic health record (EHR) systems. When designing EHR systems and policies, informaticists and system developers must balance these benefits and risks. Ethical considerations should be an explicit part of this balancing. Our objective was to develop a structured ethics framework to accomplish this. -/- Methods: We reviewed existing literature on the ethical and policy issues, developed an ethics framework called a “Points to (...) Consider” (P2C) document, and convened a national expert panel to review and critique the P2C. -/- Results: We developed the P2C to aid informaticists designing an advanced query tool for an electronic health record (EHR) system in Indianapolis. The P2C consists of six questions (“Points”) that frame important ethical issues, apply accepted principles of bioethics and Fair Information Practices, comment on how questions might be answered, and address implications for patient care. -/- Discussion: The P2C is intended to clarify whatis at stake when designers try to accommodate potentially competing ethical commitments and logistical realities. The P2C was developed to guide informaticists who were designing a query tool in an existing EHR that would permit patient granular control. While consideration of ethical issues is coming to the forefront of medical informatics design and development practices, more reflection is needed to facilitate optimal collaboration between designers and ethicists. This report contributes to that discussion. (shrink)

A quick introduction to category theory and topos theory, axiomatically. These notes are adapted from Prof. Pettigrew’s notes.

At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a (...) right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there is a right to the death of the foetus. Our strategy in this essay is to consider and reject three arguments in favour of this latter right. The first claims that women have a right not to be biological mothers, the second that women have a right to genetic privacy, and the third that a foetus is one's property. Furthermore, we argue that it follows from rejecting the third claim that genetic parents also lack a right to the destruction of cryopreserved embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The conclusion that a woman possesses no right to the death of the foetus builds upon the claims that other pro-choice advocates, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, have made. (shrink)

Traditionally, a scientific model is thought to provide a good scientific explanation to the extent that it satisfies certain scientific goals that are thought to be constitutive of explanation. Problems arise when we realize that individual scientific models cannot simultaneously satisfy all the scientific goals typically associated with explanation. A given model’s ability to satisfy some goals must always come at the expense of satisfying others. This has resulted in philosophical disputes regarding which of these goals are in fact necessary (...) for explanation, and as such which types of models can and cannot provide explanations. Explanatory monists argue that one goal will be explanatory in all contexts, while explanatory pluralists argue that the goal will vary based on pragmatic considerations. In this paper, I argue that such debates are misguided, and that both monists and pluralists are incorrect. Instead of any goal being given explanatory priority over others in a given context, the different goals are all deeply dependent on one another for their explanatory power. Any model that sacrifices some explanatory goals to attain others will always necessarily undermine its own explanatory power in the process. And so when forced to choose between individual scientific models, there can be no explanatory victors. Given that no model can satisfy all the goals typically associated with explanation, no one model in isolation can provide a good scientific explanation. Instead we must appeal to collections of models. Collections of models provide an explanation when they satisfy the web of interconnected goals that justify the explanatory power of one another. (shrink)

Anil Gupta’s Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry provides an impressive and novel account of rational justification based on conscious experience which is used as a foundation for a new theory of empiricism. In this critical notice, I argue that Gupta’s project is fascinating, but is often hampered by a lack of sufficient philosophical justification and clarity regarding some essential features of his project, as well as a lack of engagement with relevant scientific domains that would directly bear on it, such (...) as computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. This limits the sort of logical inquiry available to him in problematic ways. (shrink)

Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, the richness of conscious experience corresponds (...) to the amount of information in a conscious state and ineffability corresponds to the amount of information lost at different stages of processing. We describe how attractor dynamics in working memory would induce impoverished recollections of our original experiences, how the discrete symbolic nature of language is insufficient for describing the rich and high-dimensional structure of experiences, and how similarity in the cognitive function of two individuals relates to improved communicability of their experiences to each other. While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation of the richness and ineffability of conscious experience—two important aspects that seem to be part of what makes qualitative character so puzzling. (shrink)

In the Laws, Plato argues that legislation must not only compel, but also persuade. This is accomplished by prefacing laws with preludes. While this procedure is central to the legislative project of the dialogue, there is little interpretative agreement about the strategy of the preludes. This paper defends an interpretation according to which the strategy is to engage with citizens in a way that anticipates their progress toward a more mature evaluative outlook, and helps them grow into it. This paper (...) shall refer to this strategy as proleptic engagement. While the virtuous ways of life required by law are intimately connected to happiness, the preludes do not persuade by spelling out this connection. Rather, they persuade by telling citizens what they need to hear so that they can come to appreciate this connection for themselves, in the context of their own lives. While the preludes are many and varied, this paper argues that all preambular material can be understood as proleptic engagement. (shrink)

This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can (...) be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative. (shrink)

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a “young” disorder formally recognized in the early 1980s, although the symptoms have been noted for centuries particularly in relation to military conflicts. PTSD may develop after a serious traumatic experience that induces feelings of intense fear, helplessness or horror. It is currently characterized by three key classes of symptoms which must cause clinically significant distress or impairment of functioning: persistent and distressing re-experiencing of the trauma; persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing (...) of general responsiveness; and persistent symptoms of hyper-arousal. One of the possible symptoms within the second class is difficulty in remembering an important aspect of the traumatic event.PTSD is not an uncommon condition, with an estimated lifetime prevalence of about 7-9% based on studies conducted in the United States and Canada, with women at higher risk than men. While not everyone who experiences a significant trauma will go on to develop PTSD, about a third will do so. Sexual assault, along with other forms of assaultive violence, pose a comparatively high risk of PTSD. (shrink)

After presenting evidence about categorization behavior, this paper argues for the following theses: 1) that there is a border between perception and cognition; 2) that the border is to be characterized by perception being modular (and cognition not being so); 3) that perception outputs conceptualized representations, so views that posit that the output of perception is solely non-conceptual are false; and 4) that perceptual content consists of basic-level categories and not richer contents.

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

I discuss two categories of causal relationships: primitive causal interactions of the sort characterized by Phil Dowe and the more general manipulable causal relationships as defined by James Woodward. All primitive causal interactions are manipulable causal relationships, but there are manipulable causal relationships that are not primitive causal interactions. I’ll call the latter constructed causal relationships, and I’ll argue that constructed causal relationships serve as a foundation for both computing and complex systems. -/- Perhaps even more interesting are autonomous causal (...) relationships. These are constructed causal relationships in which the causal mechanism resides primarily in the effect. A typical example is a software execution engine. Software execution engines are on the effect side of a cause-effect relationship in which software is the cause and the behavior of the execution engine is the effect. The mechanism responsible for that causal relationship resides in the execution engine. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a novel account of concept acquisition for an atomistic theory of concepts. Conceptual atomism is rarely explored in cognitive science because of the feeling that atomistic treatments of concepts are inherently nativistic. My model illustrates, on the contrary, that atomism does not preclude the learning of a concept.

Many writers advocate the development of new and more naturalistic religions.1 Perhaps these new religions will emerge from religious naturalism. Peters believes that religious naturalism “could lead to a new significant form of organized religion with a structured community, ritual practices, and ways of moral living.”2 However, at the present time, religious naturalism is not a nature-centered religion. The features mentioned by Peters are mainly missing.3 At the present time, the most significant effort to derive a nature-centered religion from religious (...) naturalism is found in Crosby. Over the course of several books, Crosby lays out his metaphysical theory of nature.4 He uses that theory to develop a... (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

This paper has two main aims. The first is to present a general approach for understanding “dispositional” and “categorical” properties; the second aim is to use this approach to criticize Russellian Monism. On the approach I suggest, what are usually thought of as “dispositional” and “categorical” properties are really just the extreme ends of a spectrum of options. The approach allows for a number of options between these extremes, and it is plausible, I suggest, that just about everything of scientific (...) interest falls in this middle ground. I argue that Russellian Monism depends for its plausibility on the unarticulated assumption that there are no properties in the middle ground. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among a certain group of people. Then, some skeptical or anti-realist-friendly conclusion is drawn. Chapter 2 proposes that arguments from disagreement share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single, powerful objection: they self-undermine. For each formulation of the argument from disagreement, at least one of its premises casts doubt either on itself or on one of the other premises. On reflection, this shouldn’t be (...) surprising. These arguments are intended to support very strong metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality. They must therefore employ very strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy, especially about metaphysics and epistemology, very strong premises are virtually certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement—precisely the sort of disagreement that proponents of these arguments think undermine moral claims. Thus, these arguments undermine their own premises. If Chapter 2’s argument is sound, it provides realists with a single, unified strategy for responding to any existing or forthcoming arguments from disagreement. (shrink)

The guiding thread of the paper is the diagnosis that the advanced division of cognitive labor (that is, intellectual specialization) engenders a set of perennial, political and epistemic challenges (Millgram 2015) that, simultaneously, also generate opportunities for philosophy. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy as a means to advance and institutionalize philosophy. For my definition of synthetic philosophy see section 2. In section 1, I treat Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy's relationship to (...) the other sciences within the advanced division of labor. I highlight that for Plato intellectual specialization is central not just to economic, but also to political life. And, yet, that the very dispersion of scientific expertise, and its esoteric nature, also generates non-trivial challenges to the recognition and political utilization of knowledge. From Plato we can infer that in imperfect circumstances, philosophy’s self-constitution is, in part, a response to these challenges in political epistemology. However, how philosophy is institutionalized differs through time. In section 2, I re-introduce my conceptualization of synthetic philosophy and restate it. This makes visible that synthetic philosophy is already widely practiced in the profession as philosophy of the special sciences, PPE, formal modelling, public philosophy, etc. I use recent work by Dorst (2023) to illustrate synthetic philosophy and to identify some of the processes that give rise to the need for it. In sections 2-3, I contrast my account with the evolving ways that Philip Kitcher has conceptualized synthetic philosophy in order to make more precise the version promoted here. I do so not just because Kitcher and I use the same term, ‘synthetic philosophy,’ but because the temptations inherent in Kitcher’s approach should be resisted. -/- . (shrink)

There is a prevalent notion among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind that computers are merely formal symbol manipulators, performing the actions they do solely on the basis of the syntactic properties of the symbols they manipulate. This view of computers has allowed some philosophers to divorce semantics from computational explanations. Semantic content, then, becomes something one adds to computational explanations to get psychological explanations. Other philosophers, such as Stephen Stich, have taken a stronger view, advocating doing away with semantics (...) entirely. This paper argues that a correct account of computation requires us to attribute content to computational processes in order to explain which functions are being computed. This entails that computational psychology must countenance mental representations. Since anti-semantic positions are incompatible with computational psychology thus construed, they ought to be rejected. Lastly, I argue that in an important sense, computers are not formal symbol manipulators. (shrink)

The common conception of justice as reciprocity seemingly is inapplicable to relations between non-overlapping generations. This is a challenge also to John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. This text responds to this by way of reinterpreting and developing Rawls’s theory. First, by examining the original position as a model, some revisions of it are shown to be wanting. Second, by drawing on the methodology of constructivism, an alternative solution is proposed: an amendment to the primary goods named ‘sustainability of (...) values’. This revised original position lends support to intergenerational justice as fairness. (shrink)

Most people do not know there are different kinds of medical studies; some are conducted on people who already have a disease or medical condition, and others are performed on healthy volunteers who want to help science find answers. No matter what sort of research you are invited to participate in, or whether you are a patient when you are asked, it’s entirely up to you whether or not to do it. This decision is important and may have many implications (...) for your health and well-being, as well as those of other patients now and in the future. Making a good decision – the right one for you – requires you to become educated about topics you may not have thought about before, some of which may be quite complicated. This chapter explains the key issues to help you make a good decision. (shrink)

According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action that accepts Aristotle’s (...) thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My aim in this paper is to defend Normativism from a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, then implicit biases should be modulated by counterconditioning (...) or extinction but should not be modulated by rational argumentation or logical interventions. This hypothesis is false; implicit biases are not predicated on any associative structures or associative processes but instead arise because of unconscious propositionally structured beliefs. I conclude by discussing how the case study of implicit bias illuminates problems with popular dual-process models of cognitive architecture. (shrink)

Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful way to engage highly revisionary philosophical views, such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., external world, other minds, inductive, global). They take, as a premise, a highly plausible first-order claim (e.g., cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills) and conclude from it the falsity of the highly revisionary philosophical thesis. Moorean arguments can be used against nihilists in ethics (...) (error theorists), too. Recently, error theorists have recognized Moorean arguments as a powerful challenge and have tried to meet it. They’ve argued that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us, but aren’t, by offering various debunking explanations. These explanations all appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence of error in our reasoning. I argue that drawing attention to higher-order evidence is a welcome contribution from error theorists, but that the higher-order evidence actually counts further against error theoretic arguments—including their debunking explanations—and further in favor of Moorean arguments and the commonsense views they support. Along the way I answer a few prominent objections to Moorean arguments: that they are objectionably question-begging, rely on categorizing some facts as “Moorean Facts”, and that reports of one’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to that proposition’s credibility. (shrink)

Mathematics is obviously important in the sciences. And so it is likely to be equally important in any effort that aims to understand God in a scientifically significant way or that aims to clarify the relations between science and theology. The degree to which God has any perfection is absolutely infinite. We use contemporary mathematics to precisely define that absolute infinity. For any perfection, we use transfinite recursion to define an endlessly ascending series of degrees of that perfection. That series (...) rises to an absolutely infinite degree of that perfection. God has that absolutely infinite degree. We focus on the perfections of knowledge, power, and benevolence. Our model of divine infinity thus builds a bridge between mathematics and theology. (shrink)

One relatively neglected challenge in ethical artificial intelligence (AI) design is ensuring that AI systems invite a degree of emotional and moral concern appropriate to their moral standing. Although experts generally agree that current AI chatbots are not sentient to any meaningful degree, these systems can already provoke substantial attachment and sometimes intense emotional responses in users. Furthermore, rapid advances in AI technology could soon create AIs of plausibly debatable sentience and moral standing, at least by some relevant definitions. Morally (...) confusing AI systems create unfortunate ethical dilemmas for the owners and users of those systems, since it is unclear how those systems ethically should be treated. I argue here that, to the extent possible, we should avoid creating AI systems whose sentience or moral standing is unclear and that AI systems should be designed so as to invite appropriate emotional responses in ordinary users. (shrink)

Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally liable where it (...) is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. -/- Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime. (shrink)

Although advance directives are widely believed to be a key way to safeguard the autonomy of incompetent medical patients, significant questions exist about their moral authority. The main philosophical concern involves cases in which an incompetent patient no longer possesses the desires on which her advance directive was based. The question is, does that entail that prior expressions of medical choices are no longer morally binding? I believe that the answer is “yes.” I argue that a patient’s autonomy is not (...) respected by honoring the desires she used to have but no longer does. I also consider and reject the view that honoring an advance directive that reflects the patient’s previous values must be in that patient’s best interests. If that is correct, then advance directives in the kind of case at issue are not morally binding. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that promoting patient values is a legitimate goal of medicine. Our view offers a justification for certain current practices, including birth control and living organ donation, that are widely accepted but do not fit neatly within the most common extant accounts of the goals of medicine. Moreover, we argue that recognising value promotion as a goal of medicine will expand the scope of medical practice by including some procedures that are sometimes rejected as being outside (...) the scope of acceptable medical practice, such as certain forms of physician-assisted death. We then rebut some common and possible objections to this view. Our aim is not to argue that other accounts are mistaken—except when they argue for a single goal that does not include patient values—but rather to show that value promotion should play a more central role in discussions about the goals of medicine. (shrink)

Éric Delassus | : Selon Fabienne Brugère, un point de rencontre existe entre l’éthique spinoziste et les éthiques du care, le care pouvant être envisagé comme une réactualisation du conatus spinoziste. Cet article vise à démontrer que cette convergence peut s’établir à partir d’une éthique narrative inspirée de la pensée de Paul Ricoeur. Cela concerne principalement la perception que l’on peut avoir de soi en tant que corps et esprit, dans la mesure où l’esprit est défini par Baruch Spinoza comme (...) « idée du corps ». L’éthique spinoziste invite à se rendre utile aux autres pour augmenter notre puissance d’être et nous libérer d’une servitude qui n’est pas sans rapport avec la vulnérabilité telle que définie dans les éthiques du care. L’humain.e vulnérable a besoin pour se sentir exister d’avoir une idée cohérente de son corps, et le récit est l’une des voies lui permettant de progresser dans cette direction. Encore faut-il, pour y parvenir, trouver des pourvoyeuses et pourvoyeurs de care disposé.e.s à écouter, aptes à susciter en soi le désir de se raconter. | : According to Fabienne Brugère, there is common ground between Spinoza’s ethics and the ethics of care, which can be regarded as a renewal of the Spinozan concept of ‘conatus.’ This article aims to demonstrate that this form of convergence can be based upon a narrative ethic as inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s thought. It is mainly about how people can perceive themselves both as mind and body, insofar as “mind” is defined by Spinoza as the “idea of the body.” The Spinozan ethic leads us to make ourselves useful to other people in order to expand our capacity to be and to free ourselves from a form of servitude that is somewhat linked to vulnerability as it is defined in the ethics of care. Therefore, vulnerable people each need to develop consistent ideas of their bodies if they wish to feel that they do exist. Narrative is one of the many ways of advancing in that direction. However, vulnerable people should not be alone; they must be accompanied by care providers who have a sympathetic ear and who can arouse in them the desire to tell and share their stories. (shrink)

A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.

One of the deepest and longest-lasting debates in ethics concerns a version of the Euthyphro question: are choiceworthy things choiceworthy because agents have certain attitudes toward them or are they choiceworthy independent of any agents’ attitudes? Reasons internalists, such as Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, Mark Schroeder, Sharon Street, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits, and David Sobel answer in the first way. They think that all of an agent’s normative reasons for action are grounded in facts about that agent’s pro-attitudes (e.g., her (...) desires, valuing states, normative judgments). According to the most popular brand of internalism, idealizing internalism, an agent’s reasons are grounded, not in her actual pro-attitudes, but rather in what her pro-attitudes would be in suitably idealized conditions. Idealizing internalists presuppose that, for any agent with an irrational set of attitudes, there is one uniquely rational set that that agent would have if she were to undergo the relevant idealizing process. I argue that this assumption is false and that it raises two puzzles for idealizing internalism: one about the existence of practical reasons and another about their normative weight. I argue that idealizing internalists have an adequate solution to the first puzzle but not the second. Indeed, when they try to solve the second puzzle, they confront a dilemma. This second puzzle and the associated dilemma thus constitutes a powerful, but so far unnoticed, difficulty for idealizing internalism. (shrink)

Most agree that believing a proposition normally or ideally results in believing that one believes it, at least if one considers the question of whether one believes it. I defend a much stronger thesis. It is impossible to believe without knowledge of one's belief. I argue, roughly, as follows. Believing that p entails that one is able to honestly assert that p. But anyone who is able to honestly assert that p is also able to just say – i.e., authoritatively, (...) yet not on the basis of evidence – that she believes that p. And anyone who is able to just say that she believes that p is able to act in light of the fact that she holds that belief. This ability to act, in turn, constitutes knowledge of the psychological fact. However, without a broader theory of belief to help us make sense of this result, this conclusion will be hard to accept. Why should being in a particular mental state by itself necessitate an awareness of being in that state? I sketch a theory that helps to answer this question: believing is a matter of viewing a proposition as what one ought to believe. I show how this theory explains the thesis that to believe is to know that you believe. (shrink)

This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ from (...) psychological states we already countenance, in which case there is no robust notion of aliefs; on the other, if aliefs just contain associative content, then they cannot do the explanatory work set out for them, in which case there is no reason to posit aliefs at all. Thus, it appears that we have little reason to posit the novel category of robust aliefs. (shrink)

Metaphors have computable semantics. A program called NETMET both generates metaphors and produces partial literal interpretations of metaphors. NETMET is based on Kittay's semantic field theory of metaphor and Black's interaction theory of metaphor. Input to NETMET consists of a list of literal propositions. NETMET creates metaphors by finding topic and source semantic fields, producing an analogical map from source to topic, then generating utterances in which terms in the source are identified with or predicated of terms in the topic. (...) Given a metaphor, NETMET utilizes if-then rules to generate the implication complex of that metaphor. The literal leaves of the implication complex comprise a partial literal interpretation. (shrink)

You can survive after death in various kinds of artifacts. You can survive in diaries, photographs, sound recordings, and movies. But these artifacts record only superficial features of yourself. We are already close to the construction of programs that partially and approximately replicate entire human lives (by storing their memories and duplicating their personalities). A digital ghost is an artificially intelligent program that knows all about your life. It is an animated auto-biography. It replicates your patterns of belief and desire. (...) You can survive after death in a digital ghost. We discuss a series of digital ghosts over the next 50 years. As time goes by and technology advances, they are progressively more perfect replicas of the lives of their original authors. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that intentional psychology (i.e. the interpretation of human behaviour in terms of intentional states and propositional attitudes) plays an essential role in the sciences of the mind. However, this role is not one of identifying scientifically respectable states of the world. Rather, I argue that intentional psychology acts as a type of phenomenological model, as opposed to a mechanistic one. I demonstrate that, like other phenomenological models in science, intentional psychology is a methodological tool with (...) its own benefits and insights that complements our mechanistic understanding of systems. As a result, intentional psychology's distinctive scientific benefit is its ability to model systems in unique, non-mechanistic, ways. This allows us to generate predictions that we cannot otherwise generate using the mechanistic models of neuroscience and cognitive psychology necessary for various scientific tasks. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of the puzzle posed by Greenberg’s failure to come to terms with the explosion of postmodernist experimentation in the 1960’s. Greenberg, one of the most influential critics of the immediately preceding period and a strong supporter of New York abstract expressionism and color field painting, is indelibly associated with modernist schools of painting. His short essay, “Modernist Painting”, valorized precisely these movements and was a tour de force catapulting Greenberg into critic superstar status; it is still (...) one of the central documents in debates about modernism. Because Greenberg there makes references to Kant’s aesthetics in identifying the virtues of modernism his account is usually interpreted in terms of the formalism of the period and Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. This offers a reading of Greenberg as a formalist and as identifying modernism with a concern for the formal properties of art, the flatness of the picture frame and the formal relations between the aesthetic properties. Greenberg was also celebrated as having a legendary acuteness of aesthetic appreciation—a critical eye penetrating immediately to a work’s aesthetic depth. (shrink)

In some recent works, Crupi and Iacona have outlined an analysis of ‘if’ based on Chrysippus’ idea that a conditional holds whenever the negation of its consequent is incompatible with its antecedent. This paper presents a sound and complete system of conditional logic that accommodates their analysis. The soundness and completeness proofs that will be provided rely on a general method elaborated by Raidl, which applies to a wide range of systems of conditional logic.

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

Ethics should guide the design of electronic health records (EHR), and recognized principles of bioethics can play an important role. This approach was adopted recently by a team of informaticists designing and testing a system where patients exert granular control over who views their personal health information. While this method of building ethics in from the start of the design process has significant benefits, questions remain about how useful the application of bioethics principles can be in this process, especially when (...) principles conflict. For instance, while the ethical principle of respect for autonomy supports a robust system of granular control, the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence counsel restraint due to the danger of patients being harmed by restrictions on provider access to data. Conflict between principles has long been recognized by ethicists and has even motivated attacks on approaches that state and apply principles. In this paper we show how using ethical principles can help in the design of EHRs by first, explaining how ethical principles can and should be used generally, and then by, discuss how attention to details in specific cases can show that the tension between principles is not as bad as it initially appeared. We conclude by suggesting further ways in which the application of these (and other) principles can add value to the ongoing discussion of patient involvement in their health care. This is a new approach to linking principles to informatics design that we expect will stimulate further interest. (shrink)

I describe a phenomenon that has not yet been described in the epistemology literature. I label this phenomenon expression-style exclusion. Expression-style exclusion is an example of how s...

We often say that one reason is stronger, or weightier, than another. These are metaphors. What does normative strength or weight really consist in? Scanlon (2014) offers a novel answer to this question. His answer appeals to counterfactuals of various kinds. I argue that appealing to counterfactuals leads to deep problems for his view.

In special cases of partial twinning, two heads, each supporting a more-orless normal human mental life, emerge from a single torso. It is often argued that there must be two people in such a case, even if there is only one biological organism. That would pose a problem for ‘animalism’, the view that people are organisms. The paper argues that it is very hard to say what sort of non-organisms the people in such cases would be. Reflection on partial twinning (...) is no more comfortable for those who think we’re not organisms than for those who think we are. We may have to accept that a single person could have two separate mental lives. (shrink)

In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's existence in such (...) a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture. (shrink)

Whole Brain Emulation has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project makes it appear to be feasible in practice. Computationalism is a popular, independently plausible theory, (...) and Connectomics a well-funded empirical research program, so optimism about WBE is understandable. However, this optimism may be misplaced. This article argues that WBE is, at best, no more compelling than any of the other far-flung routes to achieving superintelligence. Similarly skeptical conclusions are found regarding immortality. The essay concludes with some positive considerations in favor of the Biological Theory of consciousness, as well as morals about the limits of Computationalism in both artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind more generally. (shrink)

Andr ́e Weil viewed mathematics as deeply intertwined with metaphysics. In his essay ”From Metaphysics to Mathematics,” he illustrates how mathematical ideas often arise from vague, metaphysical analogies and reflections that guide researchers toward new theories. For instance, Weil discusses how analogies between different areas, such as number theory and algebraic functions, have led to significant breakthroughs. These metaphysical underpinnings provide a fertile ground for mathematical creativity, eventually transforming into rigorous mathematical structures. -/- Alexander Grothendieck’s work, particularly in ”R ́ecoltes (...) et Semailles,” resonates with Weil’s ideas by emphasizing the organic and generative aspects of mathematical creation. Grothendieck sees mathematical work as akin to cultivating a garden, where ideas grow and develop in a nurturing environment. He describes the process of mathematical discovery as a deeply personal and creative journey, involving both solitary reflection and collaborative effort. -/- Grothendieck’s concept of creating mathematical ”houses” aligns with his broader philosophical view that mathematics provides structures within which new ideas can flourish. His work in category theory and algebraic geometry exemplifies this approach, where he developed vast, interconnected frameworks that have become foundational in modern mathematics. Grothendieck’s analogy of constructing houses for others to live in highlights the mathematician’s role in creating abstract frameworks that others can inhabit and explore. This metaphor emphasizes the constructive nature of mathematics, where researchers build theoretical structures that form the basis for further exploration and application by the mathematical community. (shrink)

The project “A Plurality of Lives” was funded and hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University, Sweden. The aim of the project was to better understand how a second origin of life, either in the form of a discovery of extraterrestrial life, life developed in a laboratory, or machines equipped with abilities previously only ascribed to living beings, will change how we understand and relate to life. Because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the project aim, (...) the project took an interdisciplinary approach with a research group made up of 12 senior researchers representing 12 different disciplines. The project resulted in a joint volume, an international symposium, several new projects, and a network of researchers in the field, all continuing to communicate about and advance the aim of the project. (shrink)