A one-boxer, Erica, and a two-boxer, Chloe, engage in a familiar debate. The debate begins with Erica asking Chloe: ‘If you’re so smart, then why ain’cha rich?’. As the debate progresses, Chloe is led to endorse a novel causalist theory of rational choice. This new theory allows Chloe to forge a connection between rational choice and long-run riches. In brief: Chloe concludes that it is not long-run wealth but rather long-run wealth creation which is symptomatic of rationality.

Face-to-face learning engagement has been suspended due to the health crisis that affected the whole world. This led to the adaptation of modular distance learning to continue delivering quality education. As the transition continues, its effectiveness has been frequently assessed. The key purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between the level of implementation of modular distance learning and English Writing Proficiency among the senior high school students in Saint Joseph College Maasin City School year 2021-2022. The study (...) employed a descriptive correlational design with 39 purposively chosen respondents. The main tools used in gathering the data were questionnaires, learning modules, and rubrics. Findings revealed that the implementation of modular distance learning (MDL) has an overall very satisfactory rating based on the perception of the students. The student’s perception of the implementation of modular distance learning and their writing proficiency is significantly related. Moreover, it revealed that students had difficulties in finding supplementary learning materials and educational support from home. The researcher recommends a set of guidelines for the successful and effective implementation of modular distance learning as the output of the study. (shrink)

Climate change adaptation is largely a local matter, and adaptation planning can benefit from local climate change projections. Such projections are typically generated by accepting climate model outputs in a relatively uncritical way. We argue, based on the IPCC’s treatment of model outputs from the CMIP5 ensemble, that this approach is unwarranted and that subjective expert judgment should play a central role in the provision of local climate change projections intended to support decision-making.

I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to primitive notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern to have two theoretical virtues: explanatory power as well as a (...) theoretical virtue I call expansiveness. A theory is expansive, roughly, when it can do more with less. (shrink)

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the assessment of coherence is a top-down process, in which the construction of a situational interpretation at the global meaning level guides local meaning analysis. (...) In support of our hypothesis, we explore the role of executive functions (brain functions involved in planning and organization of goal-oriented behaviors) in coherence’s establishment, discussing the results of several studies on narrative abilities of patients with brain injuries. We suggest that, compared to other models of discourse processing focused on comprehension, our model is a viable candidate for an integrated account of discourse comprehension and production. (shrink)

I explore proposals for stating identity criteria in terms of ground. I also address considerations for and against taking identity and distinctness facts to be ungrounded.

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on their self-report) associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. We discuss our results in (...) the light of three theoretical frameworks – cognitive bias, prototype theory, embodied account. We argue that the latter is best suited to explain the results of this study in the sense in which it implies the principle of body specificity, according to which different bodily characteristics lead to corresponding differences in the way in which people construct concepts and word meanings. (shrink)

Despite the common use of the concept of emergence, no uncontroversial theoretical framework has been yet formulated in this regard. In this paper, I examine what this circumstance suggests about the significance and usefulness of this concept. I first trace a brief history of the notion of emergence from its first formulation among the British Emergentists to its contemporary uses. Then, I outline its most common features and examine three examples of emergent phenomena, namely particle decay, free will, and division (...) of labour in ant colonies. These three cases of emergence exhibit different features and imply criteria which only partially overlap. I then suggest that the multiplicity of features and criteria recognised as defining emergence, rather than being a threat to the tenability of the concept, should encourage the assumption of a pluralist attitude that is consistent with both the employment of this idea in different sciences and the recognition of emergent phenomena across different levels of organisation. Finally, I propose that emergence can be approached in a similar way to how Richard Boyd approached the problem of natural kinds, namely by identifying an open cluster of properties, rather than a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. (shrink)

As highlighted by the last IPCC report on climate change (IPCC 2022), in addition to mitigation strategies relying on technological innovation and national and international policies, a relevant way to deal with the climate crisis is through personal behaviours such as shifting to sustainable diets. Despite being described as strategies relying on individual choices, however, the need for a global dietary change is hindered by some common narratives about food that have a relevant social dimension. Among them, the most entrenched (...) and troublesome are those related to the idea of «freedom of choice» or «consumer autonomy» (Korthals 2004; Kaplan 2019), which have at their core the idea that humans should always be free to choose their foods. The realisation of a shift from the actual diets, which in developed countries has an extremely high environmental impact, to more sustainable ones, helpful in reaching mitigation targets, seems therefore to require an examination and change in the collective stories we tell about food and, especially, an adjustment of those “freedom narratives” about our relationships with it. In this paper I first suggest that freedom narratives are misleading because the right to food choice is conflated with the right to adequate (quantity and quality of) food. Then, I show that freedom narratives are too narrow because they imply a too narrow view of human rights and lack contextual depth. Novel narratives about food should therefore be broader and should offer deeper knowledge about the relationships between humans, food and the environment. In the frame of these novel, wider stories about food, individual shifts toward sustainable lifestyles will be easier, and these achievements might be able to benefit both climate change mitigation and adaptation. (shrink)

When do probability distribution functions (PDFs) about future climate misrepresent uncertainty? How can we recognise when such misrepresentation occurs and thus avoid it in reasoning about or communicating our uncertainty? And when we should not use a PDF, what should we do instead? In this paper we address these three questions. We start by providing a classification of types of uncertainty and using this classification to illustrate when PDFs misrepresent our uncertainty in a way that may adversely affect decisions. We (...) then discuss when it is reasonable and appropriate to use a PDF to reason about or communicate uncertainty about climate. We consider two perspectives on this issue. On one, which we argue is preferable, available theory and evidence in climate science basically excludes using PDFs to represent our uncertainty. On the other, PDFs can legitimately be provided when resting on appropriate expert judgement and recognition of associated risks. Once we have specified the border between appropriate and inappropriate uses of PDFs, we explore alternatives to their use. We briefly describe two formal alternatives, namely imprecise probabilities and possibilistic distribution functions, as well as informal possibilistic alternatives. We suggest that the possibilistic alternatives are preferable. -/- . (shrink)

In the United States, roughly 1 out of 4 births takes place at a hospital certified as Baby-Friendly. This paper offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), including empirical, normative, and historical perspectives. Our analysis is novel in that we trace how medical practices of “quality improvement,” which initially appear to have little to do with breastfeeding, may have shaped the BFHI. Ultimately, we demonstrate that a rich understanding of the BFHI can be obtained by tracing how (...) norms of gender/motherhood interact with, and are supplemented by, other normative, historical, and institutional realities. We conclude with suggestions for practical revisions to the BFHI. (shrink)

The distinctive experiences of multiracial people have been underexplored in philosophy. For instance, it is not uncommon for a multiracial person to anticipate or encounter racial denials. A racial denial occurs when a person’s assertion of their racial identity, e.g. “I am Black,” is challenged or called into doubt. While monoracial individuals can generally assert their race without being challenged (e.g. “I am Black” or “I am White”), a multiracial person may be met with the rejoinder, “You aren’t really Black” (...) or “You aren’t really White.” Utilizing Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, this essay argues that some racial denials arise because our existing racial vocabulary has gaps, and that these gaps can be traced to unjust origins. Ultimately, this essay’s aim is threefold. First, it aims to understand the nature of racial denials. Second, it demonstrates that attending to the lives multiracial people can yield important insights into race and epistemic injustice. Third, by focusing on multiracial experience, this essay aims to redress — in a limited way — the marginalization of multiracial lives within philosophical theory. (shrink)

Feeding is a fundamental physiological need that falls within the realm of what we consider natural. However, throughout history, human beings have developed and employed several techniques to produce and manipulate food. Therefore, if the classical metaphysical distinction between natural and artefactual entities must be accepted, our food seems to predominantly fall into the latter category. Yet, discussions of artefacts do not typically involve organisms but rather material objects that cannot be found “in nature”. Thus, food may appear as a (...) sui generis artefact. This paper, after an analysis of the relationships holding between food and human beings, suggests that the former, rather than being an unusual artifact is the quintessential artifact, one that seems to reflect better than any other the complex connections between Homo sapiens and its environment. (shrink)

The article of Montecchi and Bufacchi is a very interesting and comprehensive analysis of the risk factors involved in the phenomenon of immigrant children. The condition of migrant involves several individual and relational changes, which form the basis for the development of psychopathology or a risky behaviour.

En este artículo analizaré el modelo de emergencia propuesto por Maurizio Ferraris en 2016, investigando sus raíces teóricas en su doctrina de la huella (icnología). Después de una revisión dedicada al debate emergentista clásico y contemporáneo, mostraré que la noción de emergencia desarrollada por Ferraris es ontológica y diacrónica. Este emergentismo, que se basa en los conceptos de huella y registro, también se configura como un concepto clave dentro del pensamiento de Ferraris, ya que representa la piedra angular de una (...) visión de la realidad que podemos definir como textualismo metafísico y que se expresa por primera vez en el texto Emergenza de 2016. (shrink)

Memory perspectives on past events allegedly take one of two shapes. In field memories, we recall episodes from a first-person point of view, while in observer memories, we look at a past scene from a third-person perspective. But this mere visuospatial dichotomy faces several practical and conceptual challenges. First, this binary distinction is not exhaustive. Second, this characterization insufficiently accounts for the phenomenology of observer memories. Third, the focus on the visual aspect of memory perspective neglects emotional, agential, and self-related (...) social aspects. Fourth, the focus on the time of recall neglects the fact that visual, emotional, agential, and social aspects of perspective can also be dissociated in the original experience. In this chapter, we move away from the standard visual dichotomy. Instead, we propose that memory perspective is better understood along four lines: visual, agential, emotional, and social. Drawing on empirical research, we argue that these dimensions predict a disposition to recall a past event based on the present situation of the memorizer. This account supports seeing episodic memory as a natural kind, supported by scenario construction mechanisms and minimal memory traces. By remapping the classic distinction between field and observer perspectives along four dimensions, our proposal provides explanatory advantages and secures practical gains by enabling testable hypotheses. (shrink)

Negli ultimi anni, il richiamo al concetto di emergenza si è fatto sempre più diffuso in molte aree della filosofia e della scienza. Il termine viene usato per riferirsi alla circostanza in cui un sistema (fisico, chimico, biologico, ma anche sociale) manifesta delle proprietà e dei comportamenti che sembrano nuovi rispetto a quelli delle sue parti più semplici. Questo libro si propone di chiarire questo fenomeno, tenendo conto, da un lato, che le discipline coinvolte nel dibattito sono molte, quindi un (...) approccio univoco all'emergenza potrebbe non bastare e, dall'altro, che per comprendere cosa sia l'emergenza è necessario delinearne le relazioni con altre questioni filosofiche di primaria importanza come quelle che coinvolgono la fondamentalità, la complessità e la causalità. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory - providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)

Imagine that someone recovers relatively quickly, say, within two or three months, from grief over the death of her spouse, whom she loved and who loved her; and suppose that, after some brief interval, she remarries. Does the fact that she feels better and moves on relatively quickly somehow diminish the quality of her earlier relationship? Does it constitute a failure to do well by the person who died? Our aim is to respond to two arguments that give affirmative answers (...) to these questions. The first argument, which is developed by Dan Moller in “Love and Death”, states that recovering relatively quickly from grief over the deaths of people who are close to us is deeply regrettable, in one respect, because it means that these people were relatively unimportant to us. The second, which derives from some classic literary discussions of grief, states that such a recovery is regrettable because it amounts to abandoning the person who died. Responding to these arguments promises to dissolve certain anxieties about whether we do well by the people we love when they die. Beyond this, it promises to help us better understand what it means to cultivate good relationships with these people during their lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rima Basu and I have offered separate accounts of wokeness as an anti-racist ethical concept. Our accounts endorse controversial doctrines in epistemology: doxastic wronging, doxastic voluntarism, and moral encroachment. Many philosophers deny these three views, favoring instead some ordinary standards for epistemic justification. I call this denial the standard view. In this paper, I offer an account of wokeness that is consistent with the standard view. I argue that wokeness is best understood as ‘group epistemic partiality’. The woke person (...) does extra epistemic work before forming a negative belief about a member of an oppressed social group. Just as we do extra epistemic work when forming belief about our friends, so the woke person does for members of oppressed social groups. I first outline the account. I then raise questions about the scope of wokeness and belief formation. After this, I demonstrate that the group partiality view is consistent with the standard view in epistemology. The partiality view, therefore, should appeal to epistemologists who have adopted the standard view because it is consistent with ordinary standards of justification. I conclude that wokeness as a concept in epistemology should not be controversial for those who endorse the standard view. (shrink)

This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight—by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a case study—a surprising and hitherto unnoticed problem with metaepistemological absolutism, at least as it has been influentially defended by Paul Boghossian as the principal metaepistemological contrast point to relativism. What we find is that the metaepistemological commitments at play on both sides of this dogmatism/conservativism debate do not line (...) up with epistemic relativism nor do they line up with absolutism, at least as Boghossian articulates this position. What this case study reveals is the need in metaepistemological option space for the recognition of a weaker and less tendentious form of absolutism, what we call “environment relativism”. On this view, epistemic principles are knowable, objective, and they can serve as the basis of particular epistemic evaluations, but their validity is relative to the wider global environment in which they are applied. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid holding failures. (...) The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (shrink)

Empirical work on motivated reasoning suggests that our judgments are influenced to a surprising extent by our wants, desires and preferences (Kahan 2016; Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979; Molden and Higgins 2012; Taber and Lodge 2006). How should we evaluate the epistemic status of beliefs formed through motivated reasoning? For example, are such beliefs epistemically justified? Are they candidates for knowledge? In liberal democracies, these questions are increasingly controversial as well as politically timely (Beebe et al. 2018; Lynch forthcoming, 2018; (...) Slothuus and de Vreese 2010). And yet, the epistemological significance of motivated reasoning has been almost entirely ignored by those working in mainstream epistemology. We aim to rectify this oversight. Using politically motivated reasoning as a case study, we show how motivated reasoning gives rise to three distinct kinds of skeptical challenges. We conclude by showing how the skeptical import of motivated reasoning has some important ramifications for how we should think about the demands of intellectual humility. (shrink)

Our aim is to provide a topography of the relevant philosophical terrain with regard to the possible ways in which knowledge can be conceived of as extended. We begin by charting the different types of internalist and externalist proposals within epistemology, and we critically examine the different formulations of the epistemic internalism/externalism debate they lead to. Next, we turn to the internalism/externalism distinction within philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In light of the above dividing lines, we then examine first (...) the extent to which content externalism is compatible with epistemic externalism; second, whether active externalism entails epistemic externalism; and third whether there are varieties of epistemic externalism that are better suited to accommodate active externalism. Finally, we examine whether the combination of epistemic and cognitive externalism is necessary for epistemology and we comment on the potential ramifications of this move for social epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about what trust is, and further, how trusting is (...) normatively constrained and best theorized about in relation to other things we value. This entry is divided into three sections, which explore key (and sometimes interconnected) ethical and epistemological themes in the philosophy of trust: (1) The Nature of Trust; (2) The Normativity of Trust, and (3) The Value of Trust. (shrink)

Reductive intellectualists (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a; 2011b; Brogaard 2008; 2009; 2011) hold that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. If this thesis is correct, then we should expect the defeasibility conditions for knowledge-how and knowledge-that to be uniform—viz., that the mechanisms of epistemic defeat which undermine propositional knowledge will be equally capable of imperilling knowledge-how. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, against intellectualism, we will show that knowledge-how is in fact resilient to being undermined by (...) the very kinds of traditional (propositional) epistemic defeaters which clearly defeat the items of propositional knowledge which intellectualists identify with knowledge-how. Second, we aim to fill an important lacuna in the contemporary debate, which is to develop an alternative way in which epistemic defeat for knowledge-how could be modelled within an anti-intellectualist framework. (shrink)

Controversial view agnosticism is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion, morality and politics. Given that one’s social identity is in no small part a function of one’s positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably ‘spineless.’ That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement—conformism—according to which the rational response (...) to discovering that someone you identify as an epistemic peer or expert about p disagrees with you vis-à-vis p is to withhold judgment. This paper proposes a novel way to maintain the core conciliatory insight without devolving into an agnosticism that is objectionably spineless. The approach offered takes as a starting point the observation that–for reasons that will be made clear—the contemporary debate has bypassed the issue of the reasonableness of maintaining, rather than giving up, representational states weaker than belief in controversial areas. The new position developed and defended here explores this overlooked space; what results is a kind of controversial view. (shrink)

According to robust virtue epistemology , knowledge is type-identical with a particular species of cognitive achievement. The identification itself is subject to some criticism on the grounds that it fails to account for the anti-luck features of knowledge. Although critics have largely focused on environmental luck, the fundamental philosophical problem facing RVE is that it is not clear why it should be a distinctive feature of cognitive abilities that they ordinarily produce beliefs in a way that is safe. We propose (...) a novel way to resolve this problem. Key to our proposal will be an appreciation of different representational states beholden to truth. We suggest these different representational states are distinguished by how, in the proper governance of these states, the twin goods of attaining truth and avoiding error are weighted. Moreover, we explain how varieties of representational states line up with varieties of cognitive achievement such that knowledge, cum cognitive achievement, must be safe because of the kind of attempt at success that belief is—namely, an attempt that places the premium it does on avoiding error. (shrink)

Full aptness is the most important concept in performance-based virtue epistemology. The structure of full aptness, in epistemology and elsewhere, is bi-levelled. At the first level, we evaluate beliefs, like performances, on the basis of whether they are successful, competent, and apt – viz., successful because competent. But the fact that aptness itself can be fragile – as it is when an apt performance could easily have been inapt – points to a higher zone of quality beyond mere aptness. To (...) break in to this zone, one must not merely perform aptly but also in doing so safeguard in skilled ways against certain risks to inaptness. But how must this be done, exactly? This paper has two central aims. First, I challenge the credentials of mainstream thinking about full-aptness by raising some new and serious problems for the view. I then propose a novel account of full aptness – what I call de minimis normativism – which keeps all the advantages of the canonical view, avoids its problems entirely, and offers some additional payoffs. (shrink)

Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent’s cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper develops and defends an approach to cognitive integration—cluster-model functionalism—which finds application in (...) both domains of inquiry, and which meets the challenge posed by putative cases of cognitive or epistemic bloat. (shrink)

Internalist approaches to epistemic justification are, though controversial, considered a live option in contemporary epistemology. Accordingly, if ‘active’ externalist approaches in the philosophy of mind—e.g. the extended cognition and extended mind theses—are _in principle_ incompatible with internalist approaches to justification in epistemology, then this will be an epistemological strike against, at least the _prima facie_ appeal of, active externalism. It is shown here however that, contrary to pretheoretical intuitions, neither the extended cognition _nor_ the extended mind theses are in principle (...) incompatible with two prominent versions of epistemic internalism—viz., accessibilism and mentalism. In fact, one possible diagnosis is that pretheoretical intuitions regarding the incompatibility of active externalism with epistemic internalism are symptomatic of a tacit yet incorrect identification of epistemic internalism with epistemic individualism. Thus, active externalism is not in principle incompatible with epistemic internalism per se and does not significantly restrict one’s options in epistemology. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey’s case “Creationist Teacher,” in which students acquire knowledge of evolutionary theory from a teacher who does not herself believe the theory, has been discussed widely as a counterexample to so-called transmission theories of testimonial knowledge and justification. The case purports to show that a speaker need not herself have knowledge or justification in order to enable listeners to acquire knowledge or justification from her assertion. The original case has been criticized on the ground that it does not really (...) refute the transmission theory, because there is still somebody in a chain of testifiers—the person from whom the creationist teacher acquired what she testifies—who knows the truth of the testified statements. In this paper, we provide a kind of pattern for generating counterexample cases, one that avoids objections discussed by Peter Graham and others in relation to such cases. (shrink)

I investigate the implication of the truth-relativist’s alleged ‘ faultless disagreements’ for issues in the epistemology of disagreement. A conclusion I draw is that the type of disagreement the truth-relativist claims to preserve fails in principle to be epistemically significant in the way we should expect disagreements to be in social-epistemic practice. In particular, the fact of faultless disagreement fails to ever play the epistemically significant role of making doxastic revision rationally required for either party in a disagreement. That the (...) truth-relativists’ disagreements over centred content fail to play this epistemically significant role that disagreements characteristically play in social epistemology should leave us sceptical that disagreement is what the truth-relativist has actually preserved. (shrink)

In a series of recent works, Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson insist that, given the ease by which irreversible destruction is achievable by a morally wicked minority, (i) strictly cognitive bio-enhancement is currently too risky, while (ii) moral bio-enhancement is plausibly morally mandatory (and urgently so). This article aims to show that the proposal Savulescu and Persson advance relies on several problematic assumptions about the separability of cognitive and moral enhancement as distinct aims. Specifically, we propose that the underpinnings of (...) Savulescu's and Persson's normative argument unravel once it is suitably clear how aiming to cognitively enhance an individual will in part require that one aim to bring about certain moral goods we show to be essential to cognitive flourishing; conversely, aiming to bring about moral enhancement in an individual must involve aiming to improve certain cognitive capacities we show to be essential to moral flourishing. After developing these points in some detail, and their implication for Savulescu's & Persson's proposal, we conclude by outlining some positive suggestions. (shrink)

Much of the climate ethics discussion centers on considerations of compensatory justice and historical accountability. However, little attention is given to supporting and defending the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a guide for policymaking. This principle states that those who have benefitted from an instance of harm have an obligation to compensate those who have been harmed. Thus, this principle implies that those benefitted by industrialization and carbon emission owe compensation to those who have been harmed by climate change. Beneficiary Pays (...) is commonly juxtaposed with Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle in the relevant literature. Beneficiary Pays withstands objections that raise suspicion for the latter two. (shrink)

According to one prominent view of exercising abilities (e.g., Millar 2009), a subject, S, counts as exercising an ability to ϕ if and only if S successfully ϕs. Such an ‘exercise-success’ thesis looks initially very plausible for abilities, perhaps even obviously or analytically true. In this paper, however, I will be defending the position that one can in fact exercise an ability to do one thing by doing some entirely distinct thing, and in doing so I’ll highlight various reasons (epistemological, (...) metaphysical and linguistic) that favor the alternative approach I develop over views that hold that the exercise of an ability is a success notion in the sense Millar maintains. (shrink)

[This is an edited version of a keynote talk at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on November 28, 2022, with some minor additions and subtractions.] -/- There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their (...) lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future. (shrink)

The philosophical significance of attitudinal autonomy—viz., the autonomy of attitudes such as beliefs—is widely discussed in the literature on moral responsibility and free will. Within this literature, a key debate centres around the following question: is the kind of attitudinal autonomy that’s relevant to moral responsibility at a given time determined entirely by a subject’s present mental structure at that time? Internalists say ‘yes’, externalists say ’no’. In this essay, I motivate a kind of distinctly epistemic attitudinal autonomy, attitudinal autonomy (...) that is relevant to knowledge. I argue that regardless of whether we are externalists or internalists about the kind of attitudinal autonomy that is relevant for moral responsibility, we should be externalists about the kind of autonomy that a belief must have to qualify as knowledge. (shrink)

Insight often strikes us blind; when we aren’t expecting it, we suddenly see a connection that previously eluded us—a kind of ‘Aha!’ experience. People with a propensity to such experiences are regarded as insightful, and insightfulness is a paradigmatic intellectual virtue. What’s not clear, however, is just what it is in virtue of which being such that these experiences tend to happen to one renders one intellectually virtuous. This paper draws from both virtue epistemology as well as empirical work on (...) the psychology of problem solving and creativity to make some inroads in accounting for insightfulness as an intellectual virtue. Important to the view advanced is that virtuously insightful individuals manifest certain skills which both cultivate insight experiences (even if not by directly bringing them about) and enable such individuals to move in an epistemically responsible way from insight experience to epistemic endorsement. (shrink)

Pascal Engel (2008) has insisted that a number of notable strategies for rejecting the knowledge norm of assertion are put forward on the basis of the wrong kinds of reasons. A central aim of this paper will be to establish the contrast point: I argue that one very familiar strategy for defending the knowledge norm of assertion—viz., that it is claimed to do better in various respects than its competitors (e.g. the justification and the truth norms)— relies on a presupposition (...) that is shown to be ultimately under motivated. That presupposition is the uniqueness thesis—that there is a unique epistemic rule for assertion, and that such a rule will govern assertions uniformly. In particular, the strategy I shall take here will be to challenge the sufficiency leg of the knowledge norm in a way that at the same time counts against Williamson’s (2000) own rationale for the uniqueness thesis. However, rather than to challenge the sufficiency leg of the knowledge norm via the familiar style of ‘expert opinion’ and, more generally, ‘second-hand knowledge’ cases (e.g. Lackey (2008)), a strategy that has recently been called into question by Benton (2014), I’ll instead advance a very different line of argument against the sufficiency thesis, one which turns on a phenomenon I call epistemic hypocrisy. (shrink)

Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), know-how is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley’s reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be resisted. In showing why, we outline different ways in which know-how can be faked even when (...) a given performance is successful; and in doing so, we distinguish how know-how can be faked (no less than know-that) via upstream and downstream indicators of its presence, and within each of these categories, we’ll distinguish (in connection with detection resilience) both faking symptoms and (various kinds of) criteria. The unappreciated resilience of faked knowledge-how to successful detection highlights a largely overlooked dimension of social-epistemic risk – risk we face not just in our capacity as recipients of testimony, but in our capacity as both (would-be) apprentices and clients of knowledge-how. (shrink)

What are the philosophical views of professional philosophers, and how do these views change over time? The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions. The results provide a snapshot of the state of some central debates in philosophy, reveal correlations and demographic effects involving philosophers' views, and reveal some changes in philosophers' views over the last decade.

A novel solution is offered for how emotional experiences can function as sources of immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs, and in such a way that suffices to halt a justificatory regress. Key to this solution is the recognition of two distinct kinds of emotional skill (what I call generative emotional skill and doxastic emotional skill) and how these must be working in tandem when emotional experience plays such a justificatory role. The paper has two main parts, the first (...) negative and the second positive. The negative part criticises the epistemic credentials of Epistemic Perceptualism (e.g., Tappolet 2012, 2016; Doring 2003, 2007; Elgin 2008; Roberts 2003), the view that emotional experience alone suffices to prima facie justify evaluative beliefs in a way that is analogous to how perceptual experience justifies our beliefs about the external world. The second part of the paper develops an account of emotional skill and uses this account to frame a revisionary form of Epistemic Perceptualism that succeeds where the traditional views could not. I conclude by considering some objections and replies. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to (...) belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically (...) affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016). (shrink)

This study delves into the feasibility of introducing a market in Barangay Tanagan, Calatagan, Batangas, with a primary focus on assessing its viability and potential impact on local economic development. Utilizing survey questionnaires and employing statistical analysis techniques, the research gathered data from a carefully selected sample of 366 residents out of the total population of 4,224. The study evaluates both the potential benefits and challenges associated with establishing the proposed market. Findings, subjected to thorough analysis through methods such as (...) frequency counts and weighted mean calculations, provide valuable insights into discernible patterns, emerging trends, and relevant correlations. This analytical approach contributes to a pragmatic perspective that informs and guides future studies in the field. The study reveals an interest among respondents in the establishment of public markets in their vicinity, recognizing its potential to bolster the barangay and attract diverse opportunities. The anticipated positive impact extends to fostering economic growth and enhancing local commerce in Barangay Tanagan. Consequently, based on these compelling findings, the researchers advocate for a proposal outlining the establishment of a public market in Barangay Tanagan as a means of addressing the identified needs and aspirations of the community. (shrink)

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to moral reasons for (...) deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

Anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti-intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge-how to φ. John Bengson & Marc Moffett (2009; 2011a; 2011b) and Carlotta Pavese (2015a; 2015b) have embraced precisely this strategy (...) and have thus claimed, for different reasons, that anti-intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument-by-counterexample to the anti- intellectualist’s sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti-intellectualism remains unscathed. (shrink)