We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism combines Millikan's teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The paper has two goals. First, we outline how a teleosemantic treatment of signal passing in predictive processing systems would work, and how it integrates with structural resemblance accounts. We show that the core explanatory motivations and conceptual machinery of teleosemantics and predictive processing mesh together well. Second, we argue this pluralist approach expands the range of empirical cases to (...) which the predictive processing framework might be successfully applied. This is because our pluralism is practice-oriented. A range of different notions of content are used in the cognitive sciences to explain behaviour, and some of these cases look to employ teleosemantic notions. As a result, our pluralism gives predictive processing the scope to cover these cases. (shrink)

This article profiles one of my mentor's research focus. The scholar has consistently published on language, teaching and learning.

In the apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, Pope Francis traces a relationship of clear interdependence between the evangelizing mission of the ecclesial community and the experience of joy that it lives in the faith in Jesus Christ. This work presents some contributions from the theology of Alexander Schmemann, in For the Life of the World, and from the philosophy of Fabrice Hadjadj, in Le paradis à la porte, which can enrich the reception of this programmatic document of the pontificate (...) of Francis. In this path, we identify four points of convergence between the two authors' vision: the rediscovery of the eucharistic dimension of joy, as an experience of a gift that extends itself as thanksgiving; of its paschal dimension, which goes through evil and pain, fertilizing them without denying them; of its epiphanic dimension, as a look that allows us to recognize the proximity of the mystery in everyday life; and of its transforming dimension, as a gratuity that spills over into an truly disinterested service. (shrink)

According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a (...) large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent a small number of people from certainly suffering the same harms. Along the way, I object to the ex ante view on the grounds that it gives an implausible degree of priority to preventing identified over statistical harms, and to the ex post view on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. An insight about the nature of claims emerges from these arguments: there are three conceptually distinct senses in which a person’s claim can be said to have a certain degree of strength. I make use of the distinction between these three senses in which a claim can be said to have strength in order to set out a new, more plausible, view about the aggregation of people’s claims under risk. (shrink)

Are the real numbers rich enough to measure intelligence? We generalize a result of Alexander and Hutter about the so-called Legg-Hutter intelligence measures of reinforcement learning agents. Using the generalized result, we exhibit a paradox: in one particular version of the Legg-Hutter intelligence measure, certain agents all have intelligence 0, even though in a certain sense some of them outperform others. We show that this paradox disappears if we vary the Legg-Hutter intelligence measure to be hyperreal-valued rather than real-valued.

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...) contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play. (shrink)

According to J. L. Schellenberg, a perfectly loving God wouldn't permit the occurrence of non-resistant non-believers – that is, non-believers who are both capable of believing in and relating to God, but who fail to believe through no fault of their own. Since non-resistant non-believers exist, says Schellenberg, it follows that God doesn't. A popular response to this argument is some version or other of the greater good defence. God, it's argued, is justified in hiding himself when done for the (...) sake of some greater good. But proponents of this defence have overlooked or neglected an important sub-argument in Schellenberg's case – what I call the ‘pre-eminent good argument’. In this article, I identify the nature of the argument and offer a solution to it. (shrink)

If the total state of the universe is encodable by a real number, Hardin and Taylor have proved that there is a solution to one version of the problem of induction, or at least a solution to a closely related epistemological problem. Is this philosophical application of the Hardin-Taylor result modest enough? The paper advances grounds for doubt. [A longer and more detailed sequel to this paper, 'Proving Induction', was published in the Australasian Journal of Logic in 2011.].

Discussion of the relevance of grounding to substantiveness, theory-choice, and “location problems” in metaphysics.

There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes” cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no experimental work has investigated the (...) scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an “evidence seeking” experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional “evidence-fixed” experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to attribute “lazy knowledge”—that someone can know something without having to check—were themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social identity. (...) The ways in which metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way diverge in character from metalinguistic negotiations are described, as are several consequences of the existence of metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way. (shrink)

Mithilfe der Theorie zur hermeneutischen Ungerechtigkeit von Miranda Fricker und anhand von Beispielen aus dem Alltag wird die Frage gestellt, inwiefern wir unsere privaten Erfahrungen und damit unser Selbst nicht artikulieren können, weil es dafür keine öffentlich geteilten sprachlichen Deutungsmuster gibt, und was wir daran ändern können.

A counterpossible is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Counterpossibles present a puzzle for standard theories of counterfactuals, which predict that all counterpossibles are semantically vacuous. Moreover, counterpossibles play an important role in many debates within metaphysics and epistemology, including debates over grounding, causation, modality, mathematics, science, and even God. In this article, we will explore various positions on counterpossibles as well as their potential philosophical consequences.

This paper presents a novel understanding of the notion of calculability. In Gricean frameworks, calculability is defined in terms of how speakers can infer an implicature. The relevant inferences must e.g. be based on maxims of conversation or cooperation principles. Meanwhile, I suggest to define calculability in terms of when, or under which conditions, speakers can infer an implicature. An implicature is calculable if hearers can infer its existence even supposing that the implicature is not semantically encoded. This approach avoids (...) familiar challenges, including recently prominent challenges from pragmatic particularism. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that truth is always evaluated using our actual linguistic conventions, even when considering counterfactual scenarios in which different conventions are adopted. This principle has been invoked in a number of philosophical arguments, including Kripke’s defense of the necessity of identity and Lewy’s objection to modal conventionalism. But it is false. It fails in the presence of what Einheuser (2006) calls c-monsters, or convention-shifting expressions (on analogy with Kaplan’s monsters, or context-shifting expressions). We show that c-monsters naturally (...) arise in contexts, such as metalinguistic negotiations, where speakers entertain alternative conventions. We develop an expressivist theory—inspired by Barker (2002) and MacFarlane (2016) on vague predications and Einheuser (2006) on counterconventionals—to model these shifts in convention. Using this framework, we reassess the philosophical arguments that invoked the conventional wisdom. (shrink)

The article describes exotic objects, the geons, which emerge as the result of gravitational attraction among massless energy quanta. It is shown that the formation of geons occurs at the energy Epl = 10^19 GeV and leads to the rise of microscopic black holes of a Planck dimension, Planck mass and two horizon events. It is shown that the formation of Planck geons is energetically more likely in 3-dimensional space than with ``physics" of geons in a space of a different (...) number of dimensions, what, as it appears, determined the 4-dimensional space-time at the very first moments after the ``Big Bang". The problem of singularity in the theory of relativity is discussed. It is shown that, from the mathematical point of view, any space of finite dimensions of any extension can be placed in a dimensionless ``point" of space of the Planck dimensions without the change of density of matter of the Metagalaxy. That theoretically solves the problem of physical singularities of the general theory of relativity. -/- . (shrink)

We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as counterconventionals. Existing semantics for counterconventionals, 459–482 ) and, 1–27 ) allow counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of predicates and relations. We extend these theories to counterlogicals by allowing counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of logical vocabulary. This yields an elegant semantics for counterlogicals that avoids problems with the usual impossible worlds semantics. We conclude by showing how this approach (...) can be extended to counterpossibles more generally. (shrink)

Recent discussions of emergence in physics have focussed on the use of limiting relations, and often particularly on singular or asymptotic limits. We discuss a putative example of emergence that does not fit into this narrative: the case of phonons. These quasi-particles have some claim to be emergent, not least because the way in which they relate to the underlying crystal is almost precisely analogous to the way in which quantum particles relate to the underlying quantum field theory. But there (...) is no need to take a limit when moving from a crystal lattice based description to the phonon description. Not only does this demonstrate that we can have emergence without limits, but also provides a way of understanding cases that do involve limits. (shrink)

A supplemental document for "Metalinguistic Gradability".

Kant’s accounts of the Highest Good and the moral argument for God and immortality are central features of his philosophy. But both involve lingering puzzles. In this entry, we first explore what the Highest Good is for Kant and the role it plays in a complete account of ethical life. We then focus on whether the Highest Good involves individuals only, or whether it also connects with Kant’s doctrines about the moral progress of the species. In conclusion, we look into (...) three ways of articulating the moral argument for God and immorality that take our commitment to the Highest Good as their point of departure. (shrink)

International regulation of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is increasingly conceived as an exercise in risk management. This requires a shared approach for assessing the risks of AWS. This paper presents a structured approach to risk assessment and regulation for AWS, adapting a qualitative framework inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It examines the interactions among key risk factors—determinants, drivers, and types—to evaluate the risk magnitude of AWS and establish risk tolerance thresholds through a risk matrix informed by (...) background knowledge of event likelihood and severity. Further, it proposes a methodology to assess community risk appetite, emphasizing that such assessments and resulting tolerance levels should be determined through deliberation in a multistakeholder forum. The paper highlights the complexities of applying risk-based regulations to AWS internationally, particularly the challenge of defining a global community for risk assessment and regulatory legitimization. (shrink)

This paper investigates the strange case of an argument that was directed against a positivist verification principle. We find an early occurrence of the argument in a talk by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden at the 1934 International Congress of Philosophy in Prague, where Carnap and Neurath were present and contributed short rejoinders. We discuss the underlying presuppositons of the argument, and we evaluate whether the attempts by Carnap (especially) actually succeed in answering this argument. We think they don’t, and offer (...) instead a few sociological thoughts about why the argument seems to have disappeared from the profession’s evaluaton of the positivist criterion of verifiability. (shrink)

I propose an approach to liar and Curry paradoxes inspired by the work of Roger Swyneshed in his treatise on insolubles (1330-1335). The keystone of the account is the idea that liar sentences and their ilk are false (and only false) and that the so-called ''capture'' direction of the T-schema should be restricted. The proposed account retains what I take to be the attractive features of Swyneshed's approach without leading to some worrying consequences Swyneshed accepts. The approach and the resulting (...) logic (called ''Swynish Logic'') are non-classical, but are consistent and compatible with many elements of the classical picture including modus ponens, modus tollens, and double-negation elimination and introduction. It is also compatible with bivalence and contravalence. My approach to these paradoxes is also immune to an important kind of revenge challenge that plagues some of its rivals. (shrink)

Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claims about the reduction or emergence of molecular structure (...) cannot be settled independently of the choice of a particular resolution to the measurement problem. Specifically, we consider how three standard putative solutions to the measurement problem inform our under- standing of a molecule in isolation, as well as of chemistry’s relation to quantum physics. (shrink)

Autonomous systems are machines that can alter their behavior without direct human oversight or control. How ought we to program them to behave? A plausible starting point is given by the Reduction to Acts Thesis, according to which we ought to program autonomous systems to do whatever a human agent ought to do in the same circumstances. Although the Reduction to Acts Thesis is initially appealing, we argue that it is false: it is sometimes permissible to program a machine to (...) do something that it would be wrong for a human to do. We advance two main arguments for this claim. First, the way an autonomous system will behave can be known in advance. This knowledge can indirectly affect the behavior of other agents, while the same may not be true at the time the system actually executes its programming. Second, a lack of knowledge of the identities of the victims and beneficiaries can provide a justification during the programming phase that would be unavailable to an agent at the time the autonomous system executes its programming. (shrink)

Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...) and organismic parthood, and to identify the implications that this has for those who want to draw on this literature when making metaphysical or mereological arguments. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel (...) way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic. (shrink)

In 1937 Joan Robinson proposed that “when capitalism is rightly understood, the rate of interest will be set at zero and the major evils of capitalism will disappear”. A permanent zero rate would abolish capitalist profit except in limited cases, leaving nearly all output to be claimed by labour as wages. It would allow capital to be allocated on the basis of prospective social benefit rather than short-term profitability and a collateral basis that favours the wealthy. It would remove some (...) of the economic pressure to use resources unsustainably. So why not do this? I argue that the few available philosophical arguments for positive interest rates are unsatisfactory. Those who want a just and sustainable form of capitalism should target net zero for the interest rate. (shrink)

Rational agents face choices, even when taking seriously the possibility of determinism. Rational agents also follow the advice of Causal Decision Theory (CDT). Although many take these claims to be well-motivated, there is growing pressure to reject one of them, as CDT seems to go badly wrong in some deterministic cases. We argue that deterministic cases do not undermine a counterfactual model of rational deliberation, which is characteristic of CDT. Rather, they force us to distinguish between counterfactuals that are relevant (...) and ones that are irrelevant for the purposes of deliberation. We incorporate this distinction into decision theory to develop ‘Selective Causal Decision Theory’, which delivers the correct recommendations in deterministic cases while respecting the key motivations behind CDT. (shrink)

This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led (...) to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

Scientific realists don’t standardly discriminate between, say, biology and fundamental physics when deciding whether the evidence and explanatory power warrant the inclusion of new entities in our ontology. As such, scientific realists are committed to a lush rainforest of special science kinds (Ross, 2000). Viruses certainly inhabit this rainforest – their explanatory power is overwhelming – but viruses’ properties can be explained from the bottom up: reductive explanations involving amino acids are generally available. However, reduction has often been taken to (...) lead to a metaphysical downgrading, so how can viruses keep their place in the rainforest? In this paper, we show how the inhabitants of the rainforest can be inoculated against the eliminative threat of reduction: by demonstrating that they are emergent. According to our account, emergence involves a screening off condition as well as novelty. We go on to demonstrate that this account of emergence, which is compatible with theoretical reducibility, satisfies common intuitions concerning what should and shouldn’t count as real: viruses are emergent, as are trout and turkeys, but philosophically gerrymandered objects like trout-turkeys do not qualify. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice is being unjustly prevented from making sense of one’s experiences, identity, or circumstances and/or communicating about them. The literature focusses almost exclusively on whether people have access to adequate conceptual resources. In this paper, we discuss a different kind of hermeneutical struggle caused by stigma. We argue that in some cases of hermeneutic injustice people have access to hermeneutical resources apt to understand their identity but reject employing these due to the stigma attached to the identity. We begin (...) with a reinterpretation of one of the cases discussed in the literature, Edmund White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story. We argue that in this case hermeneutic resources are available but are rejected due to the stigma attached to homosexuality. We then present two analogous kinds of cases: alcohol addiction and being the victim of intimate partner violence. Here, too, hermeneutic injustice occurs because of stigma attached to an identity rather than unavailability of resources. We close by suggesting that these cases may, additionally, involve the wrong of Tightlacing: by meddling with their self-conception, stigma can manipulate individuals into a view of themselves that licenses inappropriate demands on them and makes them complicit in an erasure of their identities. (shrink)

Recently, Yudkowsky and Soares (2018) and Levinstein and Soares (2020) have developed a novel decision theory, Functional Decision Theory (FDT). They claim FDT outperforms both Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) and Causal Decision Theory (CDT). Yet FDT faces several challenges. First, it yields some very counterintuitive results (Schwarz 2018; MacAskill 2019). Second, it requires a theory of counterpossibles, for which even Yudkowsky and Soares (2018) and Levinstein and Soares (2020) admit we lack a “full” or “satisfactory” account. Here, I focus on (...) the latter problem of counterpossibles. My aim is to establish two claims. First, the problem of counterpossibles does not even arise without a fairly strong assumptionone that rarely applies to human agents, but may apply to artificial agents. And second, even given this assumption, the problem is solvable, though how best to solve it remains an open question. (shrink)

The main concern of this paper is the proper analysis of the NP celui-ci in French. The contribution of L. Tasmowski to this discussion is well known. In my view, this contribution makes two important points: 1) in its anaphoric uses, celui-ci cannot be analysed as a "nominal anaphoric" along the lines suggested by Corblin for its exophoric uses. This point is also made in Kleiber, Zribi-Hertz, Imoto ; 2) eventhough celui-ci like pronouns and definite NPS must be linked in (...) its anaphoric uses to a familiar discourse referent, it involves "une rupture de familiarité" [a familiarity break]. Basically, I will argue in this paper that these two points are correct, although they seem to draw the analysis of celui-ci in two opposite directions and look somewhat paradoxical. In this paper, I propose a solution to those difficulties which is based on the analysis of celui-ci as a "mentional NP". Other mentional NPs in French are, for instance, le premier, le second, ce dernier. Mentional NPS, it will be claimed, are just NPs which are associated to a previously established discourse referent by using only the properties of the previous mention having evoked this discourse referent in the discourse context. I will claim that there is a strong association between mentionals and NPs without a noun in French, namely that mentional references are achieved by NPs without a noun. I will show moreover that this specific kind of reference based on contingent properties of a discourse referent is the key for understanding how a coindexed NP produces the break in topic continuity noted by Tasmowski. (shrink)

Anscombe claims that whenever a subject is doing something intentionally, this subject knows that they are doing it. This essay defends Anscombe's claim from an influential set of counterexamples, due to Davidson. It argues that Davidson's counterexamples are tacit appeals to an argument, on which knowledge can't be essential to doing something intentionally, because some things that can be done intentionally require knowledge of future successes, and because such knowledge can't ever be guaranteed when someone is doing something intentionally. The (...) essay argues that there are apparently sensible grounds for denying each of these two premises. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to offer support for the substance view of persons, the philosophical anthropology defended by Patrick Lee in his essay. In order to accomplish this the author presents a brief definition of the substance view; argues that the substance view has more explanatory power in accounting for why we believe that human persons are intrinsically valuable even when they are not functioning as such, why human persons remain identical to themselves over time, and why it (...) follows from these points that the unborn are human persons; and responds to two arguments that attempt to establish the claim that the early human being is not a unified substance until at least fourteen days after conception. (shrink)

Grounding and explanation are said to be intimately connected. Some even maintain that grounding just is a form of explanation. But grounding and explanation also seem importantly different—on the face of it, the former is ‘worldy’ or ‘objective’ while the latter isn’t. In this paper, we develop and respond to an argument to the effect that there is no way to fruitfully address this tension that retains orthodox views about grounding and explanation but doesn’t undermine a central piece of methodology, (...) namely that explanation is a guide to ground. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse how GPS-based navigation systems are transforming some of our intellectual virtues and then suggest two strategies to improve our practices regarding the use of such epistemic tools. We start by outlining the two main approaches in virtue epistemology, namely virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. We then discuss how navigation systems can undermine five epistemic virtues, namely memory, perception, attention, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual carefulness. We end by considering two possible interlinked ways of trying to remedy (...) this situation: [i] redesigning the epistemic tool to improve the epistemic virtues of memory, perception, and attention; and [ii] the cultivation of cognitive diligence for wayfinding tasks scaffolding intellectual autonomy and carefulness. (shrink)

A common objection to the very idea of conceptual engineering is the topic continuity problem: whenever one tries to “reengineer” a concept, one only shifts attention away from one concept to another. Put differently, there is no such thing as conceptual revision: there’s only conceptual replacement. Here, I show that topic continuity is compatible with conceptual replacement. Whether the topic is preserved in an act of conceptual replacement simply depends on what is being replaced (a conceptual tool or a conceptual (...) role) and what the topic under discussion is. Thus, the topic continuity problem only arises from a failure to specify these two things. (shrink)

A counteridentical is a counterfactual with an identity statement in the antecedent. While counteridenticals generally seem non-trivial, most semantic theories for counterfactuals, when combined with the necessity of identity and distinctness, attribute vacuous truth conditions to such counterfactuals. In light of this, one could try to save the orthodox theories either by appealing to pragmatics or by denying that the antecedents of alleged counteridenticals really contain identity claims. Or one could reject the orthodox theory of counterfactuals in favor of a (...) hyperintensional semantics that accommodates non-trivial counterpossibles. In this paper, I argue that none of these approaches can account for all the peculiar features of counteridenticals. Instead, I propose a modified version of Lewis’s counterpart theory, which rejects the necessity of identity, and show that it can explain all the peculiar features of counteridenticals in a satisfactory way. I conclude by defending the plausibility of contingent identity from objections. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce a distinctive kind of psychological abuse we call Tightlacing. We begin by presenting four examples and argue that there is a distinctive form of abuse in these examples that cannot be captured by our existing moral categories. We then outline our diagnosis of this distinctive form of abuse. Tightlacing consists in inducing a mistaken self-conception in others that licenses overburdening demands on them such that victims apply those demands to themselves. We discuss typical Tightlacing strategies (...) and argue that Tightlacing typically is manipulative. Typical tightlacers will be motivated by a strong desire to suppress a kind of behaviour on the victim’s part. We will then differentiate Tightlacing from a related and widely discussed form of psychological abuse, Gaslighting. While Gaslighting focuses on the victim’s epistemic capacities and typically serves to insulate the abuser from potential dissent, Tightlacing focuses on the kind of person the victim is and typically serves to insulate the abuser from confronting ways of behaviour they cannot cope with. While Gaslighting targets the victim’s epistemic self-trust, Tightlacing targets their basic sense of who they are and their sense of entitlement to conduct themselves as who they really are. We finish by diagnosing the wrong-making features of Tightlacing, arguing that Tightlacing, among many secondary wrongs, makes the victim complicit in a denial of their rights as well as an erasure of who they are. (shrink)

Jennifer Nagel (2010) has recently proposed a fascinating account of the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge in conversational contexts in which unrealized possibilities of error have been mentioned. Her account appeals to epistemic egocentrism, or what is sometimes called the curse of knowledge, an egocentric bias to attribute our own mental states to other people (and sometimes our own future and past selves). Our aim in this paper is to investigate the empirical merits of Nagel’s hypothesis about the psychology involved (...) in knowledge attribution. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper proposes an abstract mathematical frame for describing some features of biological time. The key point is that usual physical (linear) representation of time is insufficient, in our view, for the understanding key phenomena of life, such as rhythms, both physical (circadian, seasonal …) and properly biological (heart beating, respiration, metabolic …). In particular, the role of biological rhythms do not seem to have any counterpart in mathematical formalization of physical clocks, which are based on frequencies along the usual (...) (possibly thermodynamical, thus oriented) time. We then suggest a functional representation of biological time by a 2-dimensional manifold as a mathematical frame for accommodating autonomous biological rhythms. The “visual” representation of rhythms so obtained, in particular heart beatings, will provide, by a few examples, hints towards possible applications of our approach to the understanding of interspecific differences or intraspecific pathologies. The 3- dimensional embedding space, needed for purely mathematical reasons, allows to introduce a suitable extra-dimension for “representation time”, with a cognitive significance. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that the universality of critical phenomena is explained through particular applications of the renormalization group. This article has three aims: to clarify the structure of the explanation of universality, to discuss the physics of such RG explanations, and to examine the extent to which universality is thus explained. The derivation of critical exponents proceeds via a real-space or a field-theoretic approach to the RG. Building on work by Mainwood, this article argues that these approaches ought to (...) be distinguished: while the field-theoretic approach explains universality, the real-space approach fails to provide an adequate explanation. (shrink)

The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological emergence. This will be cashed out with a case study that identifies decoherence as the mechanism for emergence. The greater metaphysical clarity enables the rebuttal of critiques due to Baker (2007) and Dawid and Th\'ebault (2015) that cast the emergent multiverse ontology as incoherent; responses (...) are also offered to challenges to the Everettian approach from Maudlin (2010) and Monton (2013). (shrink)

Does art have ethical possibilities? Can literature disclose our responsibilityfor other people? This short text aims to unfold some nuances of responsible and irresponsible art as they appear in Emmanuel Levinas's sparse remarks on aesthetics. We examine some common ways of conceiving Levinas's thoughts in literary studies, followed by a closer discussion of his ideas on the possibilities of art in "Reality and Its Shadow" and his late interviews on Vasily Grossman and Sacha Sosno.

Kant’s claim that we must postulate the immortality of the soul is polarizing. While much attention has been paid to two standard arguments in its defense (one moral-psychological, the other rational), I contend that a favorite argument of Kant’s from the apogee of his critical period, namely, the teleological argument, deserves renewed attention. This paper reconstructs it and exhibits what makes it unique (though not necessarily superior) in relation to the other arguments. In particular, its form (as third-personal or descriptive, (...) beginning from observations) and related force of assent (as a subjectively universal reflective judgment) set it apart from the other arguments. My goal is to establish that any engagement with Kant’s immortality postulate must include equal consideration of the teleological argument in order to be complete. (shrink)

In chapter 3 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke’s Wittgenstein offers a “sceptical solution" to the sceptical paradox about meaning developed in chapter 2 (according to which there are no facts in virtue of which ascriptions of meaning such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” can be true). Although many commentators have taken the sceptical solution to be broadly analogous to non-factualist theories in other domains, such as non-cognitivism or expressivism in metaethics, the nature of the sceptical solution (...) has not been well-understood. The main aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of the nature of the non-factualism about meaning proposed in the sceptical solution. It attempts to outline some desiderata that should be respected by interpretations of the sceptical solution and considers two objections raised against it in Barry Stroud’s paper “Wittgenstein on Meaning, Understanding and Community". It attempts to correct misconstruals of the sceptical solution that have been promulgated by Davidson and some of his followers and suggests that the sceptical solution developed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein is best viewed as a form of quasi-realism about meaning. It ends by outlining what it takes to be the most pressing challenges facing the sceptical solution. (shrink)