This thesis presents an interpretation of David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. The most distinguishing feature of this interpretation is the emphasis placed on the significance of Hume’s general philosophical position in a faithful reading of this philosophical classic. The success of this interpretation will show that Hume’s essay should be read as an integral part of his system of philosophy. There are three parts in this thesis. The first part is an overview of some key aspects of (...) Hume’s philosophy which are relevant to my interpretation. Unlike many contemporary philosophers in the analytic tradition, Hume is a systematic thinker. A faithful reading of his works should take his general philosophical framework seriously. Therefore, this overview of his system serves as the general background of the next two parts. The second part is a discussion of Hume’s aesthetic thought. More specifically, it provides an exposition of his view on beauty and judgements of beauty. This part completes the stage-setting for the development of my interpretation, by helping the reader form a more specific conceptual framework for understanding Hume’s essay. The third part develops an interpretation of ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ according to what has been provided in the previous two parts. It starts with an outline of the essay, which indicates Hume’s aim in writing it. After that, a few sections are devoted to some central elements of the essay. The last section of this part discusses four controversies concerning Hume’s essay. These discussions establish the strength of this interpretation, or at least, the fruitful prospect of an interpretative project that integrates Hume’s essay into his whole system. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to revive wave theory in the philosophy of sound. Wave theory identifies sounds with compression waves. Despite its wide acceptance in the scientific community as the default position, many philosophers have rejected wave theory and opted for different versions of distal theory instead. According to this current majority view, a sound has its stationary location at its source. I argue against this and other alternative philosophical theories of sound and develop wave theory into a more defensible form. (...) Philosophers of sound tend to emphasise how sounds are experienced to be in their arguments. Most often, it is assumed that that which appears to be a distally located bearer of auditory properties in an auditory experience is a sound. Chapter 1 argues that if this distal entity is the sound source instead, many of the existing theories of sound will be severely affected. Chapter 2 discusses auditory perception and criticises the common assumption that we hear non-sound entities in virtue of hearing sounds. I show that this assumption begs the question against certain theories of sound and that the contrary view that sound sources can be directly heard is more plausible. If sound sources can be directly heard, then features commonly attributed to sounds based on auditory experiences might rather be features of sound sources. I examine eight of such features in Chapter 3. Only four of them survive. Chapters 4 and 5 review the existing theories of sound. After a taxonomy of existing theories of sound, each theory is criticised one-by-one. Some of them are problematic precisely because they rely on the implausible assumption that that which appears to be distally located in an auditory experience is a sound rather than a sound source. Lastly, Chapter 6 focuses on wave theory. It begins with two positive arguments for wave theory in general, followed by my replies to two common objections in the literature. I then move on to develop my version of wave theory. There are two core aspects of my view. The first one is a metaphysics of compression waves; the second is an account of what it is to hear compression waves. After comparing my view with a similar theory, I demonstrate the explanatory power of my view in two steps. First, the eight commonly accepted features of sounds examined in Chapter 3 are revisited. It turns out that my view can accommodate all of them. Second, explanations for four special sound-related phenomena are offered at the end of the chapter. I conclude in the last chapter with the suggestion that, as a philosopher, the best way to defend wave theory is to offer a better understanding of auditory perception which explains how compression waves are experienced. (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his exploration, (...) Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though (...) this ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as ‘normative’ in two important ways. The first way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between actual and correct use. The second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the grounding base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can see our commitment to the ‘determinacy’ of meaning as a practical commitment that structures our linguistic practices rather than a theoretical commitment that merely describes them. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the risks and benefits of Social AI, understood as conversational AI systems that cater to human social needs like romance, companionship, or entertainment. Section 1 of the paper provides a brief history of conversational AI systems and introduces conceptual distinctions to help distinguish varieties of Social AI and pathways to their deployment. Section 2 of the paper adds further context via a brief discussion of anthropomorphism and its relevance to assessment of human-chatbot relationships. Section (...) 3 of the paper provides a survey of potential and in some cases demonstrated harms associated with user interactions with Social AI systems. Finally, Section 4 discusses how the benefits and harms of Social AI can best be addressed, with a primary focus on how frameworks from AI ethics can inform their development. (shrink)

I introduce game-theoretic models for threats to the discussion of threats in speech act theory. I first distinguish three categories of verbal threats: conditional threats, categorical threats, and covert threats. I establish that all categories of threats can be characterized in terms of an underlying conditional structure. I argue that the aim—or illocutionary point—of a threat is to change the conditions under which an agent makes decisions in a game. Threats are moves in a game that instantiate a subgame in (...) which the addressee is ‘under threat’. (shrink)

In light of recent breakneck pace in machine learning, questions about whether near-future artificial systems might be conscious and possess moral status are increasingly pressing. This paper argues that as matters stand these debates lack any clear criteria for resolution via the science of consciousness. Instead, insofar as they are settled at all, it is likely to be via shifts in public attitudes brought about by the increasingly close relationships between humans and AI users. Section 1 of the paper I (...) briefly lays out the current state of the science of consciousness and its limitations insofar as these pertain to machine consciousness, and claims that there are no obvious consensus frameworks to inform public opinion on AI consciousness. Section 2 examines the rise of conversational chatbots or Social AI, and argues that in many cases, these elicit strong and sincere attributions of consciousness, mentality, and moral status from users, a trend likely to become more widespread. Section 3 presents an inconsistent triad for theories that attempt to link consciousness, behaviour, and moral status, noting that the trends in Social AI systems will likely make the inconsistency of these three premises more pressing. Finally, Section 4 presents some limited suggestions for how consciousness and AI research communities should respond to the gap between expert opinion and folk judgment. (shrink)

He (和), or harmony, has traditionally been a central concept in Chinese thought, and to this day continues to shape the way in which people in China and East Asia think about ethics and politics. Yet, there is no systematic and comprehensive introduction of harmony as has been variously articulated in different Chinese schools. This edited volume aims to fill this gap. The individual contributions elaborate the conceptions of harmony as these were exemplified in central Chinese schools of thought, including (...) Daoism, Confucianism, Legalism, Mohism, Buddhism, and trace their impact on contemporary Chinese philosophy. The volume explores the various meanings and implications of harmony so as to consider its relevance as a value and virtue in the modern world. It provides an accessible but substantial introductory work for readers interested in learning about pertinent core concepts and theories in Chinese thought, as well as engages specialists in Chinese philosophy by explicating its implications for ethical, political, epistemological, and metaphysical reflection as the basic point of reference. (shrink)

In our day-to-day lives, we form responsibility judgements about one another – but we are imperfect beings, and our judgments can be mistaken. This paper suggests that we get things wrong not merely by chance, but predictably and systematically. In particular, these miscues are common when we are dealing with large gaps in social status and power. That is, when we form judgements about those who are much more or less socially powerful than ourselves, it is increasingly likely that “epistemic (...) distorters” will reliably disrupt our reasoning. In response to this situation, I argue for the introduction of a new norm concerning blame and social status: “Powerful Restraint.” This norm suggests that the socially powerful ought to blame the socially dispossessed less frequently, and that social pressure be applied to achieve that compliance. I argue that such a norm is justified given the pernicious down-stream moral effects of the up-stream epistemic distortion I describe. I defend it against objections that it suggests a normative solution to an epistemic problem, that it is paternalistic, and that it involves a kind of disrespect to the less socially powerful. (shrink)

We are often justified in acting on the basis of evidential confirmation. I argue that such evidence supports belief in non-quantificational generic generalizations, rather than universally quantified generalizations. I show how this account supports, rather than undermines, a Bayesian account of confirmation. Induction from confirming instances of a generalization to belief in the corresponding generic is part of a reasoning instinct that is typically (but not always) correct, and allows us to approximate the predictions that formal epistemology would make.

A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of the main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for "stuff" like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask "how many?," but with stuff the question has to be "how much?" Laycock's fascinating exploration also addresses key logical and linguistic questions about (...) the way we categorize the many and the much. (shrink)

The possibility of employing human enhancement interventions to aid in future space missions has been gaining attention lately. These possibilities have included one of the more controversial kinds of enhancements: biomedical moral enhancement. However, the discussion has thus far remained on a rather abstract level. In this paper we further this conversation by looking more closely at what type of interventions with what sort of effects we should expect when we are talking about biomedical moral enhancements. We suggest that a (...) more grounded way to picture moral enhancement, at least in the near term, is to envision a form of cognitive enhancement that also provides some moral benefits by heightening the enhanced person's capability for acting according to their own subjective moral code. While this concept of moral adherence enhancement also has relevance for the moral enhancement discussion more widely, in this paper we apply it specifically in the context of space missions. We argue that there are weighty reasons to consider making biomedical enhancements of the proposed kind a mandatory feature of early-phase long-distance space travel because these missions are high-stakes in nature and take place in an environment where the enhancement could be seen as conferring important advantages while negating many of the traditional arguments weighed against it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation for Sartre’s account of the unity of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego. I will argue that it is only once The Transcendence of the Ego is read alongside other texts written around the same time, such as The Imaginary, that we can understand how Sartre believes it is possible for consciousness to be unified without an I. I begin by setting out the Kantian context that Sartre develops for (...) his views, before looking at Sartre’s arguments themselves. I then turn to some of the difficulties other readers have encountered with making sense of the arguments of the Transcendence of the Ego. I argue that it is only in relation to Sartre’s account of what he calls the illusion of immanence in The Imaginary, that we can make sense of Sartre’s account of consciousness, before reconstructing what I take to be Sartre’s position drawing on Sartre’s references to Bergson and Spinoza. (shrink)

How seriously should we take the idea that the mind employs mental files? Goodman and Gray (2022) argue that mental filing – a thinker rationally treating her cognitive states as being about the same thing – can be explained without files. Instead, they argue that the standard commitments of mental file theory, as represented by Recanati’s indexical model, are better seen in terms of a relational representational feature of object representations, which in turn is based on the epistemic links a (...) thinker bears to objects. This paper argues that this revision is misguided. Neither the representational property nor any basic role for epistemic links are needed for an adequate explanatory theory that makes use of the image of a mental filing system. A better alternative to the indexical model does posit files, albeit as causal-functional entities. This makes additional representational features redundant, and shows that epistemic links play a secondary role. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content is just to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficulty is (...) insurmountable: the contents of occurrent desires cannot be determined by acts of predication. (shrink)

Triviality arguments against the computational theory of mind claim that computational implementation is trivial and thus does not serve as an adequate metaphysical basis for mental states. It is common to take computational implementation to consist in a mapping from physical states to abstract computational states. In this paper, I propose a novel constraint on the kinds of physical states that can implement computational states, which helps to specify what it is for two physical states to non-trivially implement the same (...) computational state. (shrink)

James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” sheds light not only on his views on ethics but also on his general approach to objectivity. Indeed, the paper is most interesting not for the ethical theory it defends but for its general openness to the possibility of our ethical claims lacking objective truth conditions at all. James will turn out to have a very demanding account of what it would take to construct something like objective ethical norms out of more (...) naturalistically respectable material such as our evaluative practices, but in doing so, he also faces up to the possibility that this objectivity is something we may fail to achieve. This comparatively pessimistic prospect in turn explains his surprising pivot toward the divine at the end of the “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (MPML) James’s appeal to the divine is characteristically idiosyncratic, however, and this paper will attempt to explain how it fits in with the more generally naturalistic framework that dominates the rest of the paper. (shrink)

Reformed catholicity suffers from a fragility that causes it to easily fragment over comparatively small differences. This study wagers that an important resource that can be useful for addressing this problem is the Chinese philosophy of tianxia. The article introduces the idea of a ‘Reformed catholicity under Heaven’ by placing a more liberal interpretation of tianxia in conversation with the problems in Reformed approaches to the church’s catholicity. In doing so, the article demonstrates tianxia’s ecclesiological usefulness while articulating two dimensions (...) of ‘Reformed catholicity under Heaven’ that can deepen how Reformed churches inhabit catholicity in ways that promote unity. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel conception of mental files, aimed at addressing Frege puzzles. Classical Frege puzzles involve ignorance and discovery of identity. These may be addressed by accounting for a more basic way for identity to figure in thought—the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. This manifests itself in rational inferences that presuppose the identity of what the beliefs are about. Mental files help to provide a functional characterization of a mind capable of (...) this presupposition, but more must be said to show how it may be rational. I argue that this can be done by drawing out the way in which mental files interact with a thinker's motivational states and so come to have normative functional properties. I show how this theory works better than some other treatments of mental files. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the underlying structure of such harms: I argue that speakers are the subjects of illocutionary harm when there is interference in the entitlement structure of their linguistic activities. This interference comes in two forms: denial and incapacitation. In cases of denial, a speaker is prevented from achieving the outcomes to which they are (...) entitled by their speech. In cases of incapacitation, a speaker’s standing to expect certain outcomes is itself undermined. I also discuss how individual speakers are subject to interference along two dimensions: as exercisers of certain non-linguistic capacities, and as producers of meaningful speech. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM OF THE BEING OF THE EGO AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ONTOLOGY "Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, der Philosophic ...

The idea that humans might one day form persistent and dynamic relationships in professional, social, and even romantic contexts is a longstanding one. However, developments in machine learning and especially natural language processing over the last five years have led to this possibility becoming actualised at a previously unseen scale. Apps like Replika, Xiaoice, and CharacterAI boast many millions of active long-term users, and give rise to emotionally complex experiences. In this paper, I provide an overview of these developments, beginning (...) in Section 1 with historical and technical context. In Section 2, I lay out a basic theoretical framework for classifying human-AI relationships and their specific dynamics. Section 3 turns to ethical issues, with a focus on the core philosophical question of whether human-AI relationships can have similar intrinsic value to that possessed by human-human relationships. Section 4 extends to the discussion of ethical issues to the more empirical matter of harms and benefits of human-AI relationships. The paper concludes by noting potentially instructive parallels between the nascent field of ‘Social AI’ and the recent history of social media. (shrink)

When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...) which their bodies will move—details an intention alone leaves unsettled. This requires, among other things, that we reject views on which agents’ control is identical with their practical rationality. When all goes well, agents attentionally prioritize what is motivationally relevant to them to the exclusion of what would otherwise distract them from achieving their goals. However, sometimes agents attend distractedly—i.e., without prioritizing. As the aim of attention is to avoid distraction, this entails the possibility of defective attention. Defective attention, in turn, casts light on scenarios in which agents lose control over what they are doing, as when a skilled practitioner ‘chokes under pressure’. A complaint sometimes levelled against accounts, like mine, that claim to reduce agents’ control of their behaviour to that of causally efficacious mental states or events is that these accounts invariably deprive agents themselves of their rightful role in the generation of behaviour. This is the “Disappearing Agent Problem” for “reductive” or “event-causal” theories of action. I argue that, correctly understood, extant reductive theories do face a genuine Disappearing Agent Problem. However, it is a problem we solve by recognizing the role that conscious attention plays in making an action the agent’s own. Accordingly, I develop and defend an attentional account of action ownership. On this view, allocating conscious attention in service of your goals is sufficient for a kind of conscious perspective (“motivational perspective”), which, when active in controlling your behaviour, constitutes the behaviour as your own doing. As I explain, such perspective also contributes to explaining the subjective structure of your perceptual awareness of the world around you. (shrink)

It has become somewhat of a platitude to call Aristotle the first epigenesist insofar as he thought form and structure emerged gradually from an unorganized, amorphous embryo. But modern biology now recognizes two senses of “epigenesis”. The first is this more familiar idea about the gradual emergence of form and structure, which is traditionally opposed to the idea of preformationism. But modern biologists also use “epigenesis” to emphasize the context-dependency of the process itself. Used in this sense development is not (...) simply the unfolding of a pre-determined sequence of changes specified in advance by the organism’s genotype. It is also sensitive to inputs from the internal and external environment, which help determine in real-time which of the many potential developmental pathways are actualized during the process. Within this paradigm developing embryos are viewed as dynamic and responsive systems that react to inputs from the internal and external environment ‘on the fly’. In this paper I argue that, while Aristotle was an epigenesist in the first sense, he would have rejected epigenesis in the more modern sense. First, Aristotle’s model of choice for a developing embryo is the automaton that executes a set of preset movements (GA 734b9-13, 741b7-15). The automatons he has in mind are not dynamic AI systems capable of modifying their behaviour on the fly in response to environmental cues but completely deterministic mechanisms whose movements are fixed by their original design. Second, given Aristotle’s views about the different kinds of causal powers there are, it looks like only intentional agents endowed with actual decision-making powers could be capable of the sort of plasticity at the core of a more dynamic epigenesis. For that kind of epigenesis requires powers for alternative outcomes, and Aristotle is explicit that such powers require rational desires (προαίρεσις) that control which of those alternatives to bring about. If I am right, then he could not have made sense of the idea of a developing embryo (as a non-intentional system) making adjustments to its phenotype on the fly in response to emerging problems and opportunities, given the conceptual resources available to him. (shrink)

The papers in this volume originated in a workshop on externalism and conceptual change held at the University of St. Andrews in June 2018. The discussion of conceptual change was driven largely by...

Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the average, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science and in the history of science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Cognitive science research on the ways people ordinarily make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical (...) notion of the average, people tend to use a value-laden notion of the normal. Similarly, historical research on the scientific practices used in other time periods indicates that, prior to the nineteenth century, scientists tended to make use of a notion of the normal that was overtly value-laden. These findings give us reason to rethink certain familiar facts about scientific practice. In particular, they suggest that the fact that scientists so often make use of the statistical average should be seen as a highly surprising fact, the sort of thing that calls out for explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p.

William James was one of the most frequently cited authors in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but the attention paid to James’s Principles of Psycho- logy in that work is typically explained in terms of James having ‘committed in a clear, exemplary manner, fundamental errors in the philosophy of mind.’ (Goodman 2002, p. viii.) The most notable of these ‘errors’ was James’s purported commitment to a conception of language as ‘private’. Commentators standardly treat James as committed to a conception of language as (...) private, and the most notorious instance of this commitment can purportedly be found in his discussion of the feelings associated with logical terms like ‘and’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ in the Principles’s chapter, ‘The Stream of Thought’. However, the received view stands in need of serious re-evaluation. In particular, there is little reason to think that James’s notorious discussion of the ‘if-feeling’ should be understood as an attempt to give an account of the meaning of ‘if ’ (indeed, there is little reason to even think that Wittgenstein interpreted him this way). The picture of our ideas developed in ‘The Stream of Thought’ sits badly with any theory that identifies meanings with ideas in this way, and while James’s chapter on ‘Conception’ (as well as some portions of Some Problems of Philosophy) has also been portrayed as committing James to the in principle privacy of language, it will be argued here that James’s account of our ‘conceptions’ is radically different from that of the private linguist. (shrink)

The Nyāya school of classical Indian epistemology defended (by today’s standards) a radical version of epistemic externalism. They also gave arguments from their epistemological positions to an early version of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. In this paper I assess the value of such an argument, concluding that a modified version of the Nyāya argument may be defensible.

The philosophy of biomimicry, I argue, consists of four main areas of inquiry. The first, which has already been explored by Freya Mathews, concerns the “deep” question of what Nature ultimately is. The second, third, and fourth areas correspond to the three basic principles of biomimicry as laid out by Janine Benyus. “Nature as model” is the poetic principle of biomimicry, for it tells us how it is that things are to be “brought forth”. “Nature as measure” is the ethical (...) principle of biomimicry, for it tells us that Nature places ethical limits or standards on what it is possible for us to accomplish. And “Nature as mentor” is the epistemological principle of biomimicry, for it affirms that Nature is the ultimate source of truth, wisdom, and freedom from error. Within this overall framework, I argue that seeing Nature as physis—understood as “self-production” or “self-placing-into-the-open”—constitutes the requisite ground for the poetic, ethical, and epistemological principles of biomimicry, and that biomimicry thus conceived involves a new philosophical paradigm, which I call “enlightened naturalism”. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the interactions between holism, contextualism, and externalism, and will argue that an externalist metasemantics that grounds itself in certain plausible assumptions about self- knowledge will also be a contextualist metasemantics, and that such a contextualist metasemantics in turn resolves one of the best known problems externalist theories purportedly have with self-knowledge, namely the problem of how the possibility of various sorts of ‘switching’ cases can appear to undermine the ‘transparency’ of our thoughts (in particular, our (...) ability to tell, with respect to any two occurrent thoughts, whether they exercise the same or different concepts). (shrink)

Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of (...) complete indifference—a will either believe p or disbelieve p. I expand and revise this explanation: so-called ‘weak’ attitude verbs are used in ascriptions of an opinion about some subject matter S—a kind of selection from among the elements of S—and these ascriptions are themselves responsive to conversational topics that presuppose that the subject of the ascription has an opinion about S. ‘Strong’ attitude verbs denote more direct relationships between subject and world. (shrink)

It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This (...) paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought. (shrink)

Mereological entities often seem to violate ‘ordinary’ ideas of what a concrete object can be like, behaving more like sets than like Aristotelian substances. However, the mereological notions of ‘part’, ‘composition’, and ‘sum’ or ‘fusion’ appear to find concrete realisation in the actual semantics of mass nouns. Quine notes that ‘any sum of parts which are water is water’; and the wine from a single barrel can be distributed around the globe without affecting its identity. Is there here, as some (...) have claimed, a ‘natural’ or ‘innocent’ form of mereology? The claim rests on the assumption that what a mass noun such as ‘wine’ denotes — the wine from a single barrel, for example — is indeed a unit of a special type, the sum or fusion of its many ‘parts’. The assumption is, however, open to question on semantic grounds. (shrink)

In this paper I address an important question in Aristotle’s biology, What are the causal mechanisms behind the transmission of biological form? Aristotle’s answer to this question, I argue, is found in Generation of Animals Book 4 in connection with his investigation into the phenomenon of inheritance. There we are told that an organism’s reproductive material contains a set of "movements" which are derived from the various "potentials" of its nature (the internal principle of change that initiates and controls development). (...) These movements, I suggest, function as specialized vehicles for communicating the parts of the parent’s heritable form during the act of reproduction. After exploring the details of this mechanism, I then take up Aristotle’s theory of inheritance proper. At the heart of the theory are three general principles (or 'laws') that govern the interactions between the maternal and paternal movements, the outcome of which determines the pattern of inheritance for the offspring. Although this paper is primarily aimed at providing a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s account of inheritance, the results of that analysis have implications for other areas of Aristotle’s biology. One of the most interesting of these is the question of whether Aristotle’s biology is anti-evolutionary (as traditionally assumed) or whether (as I argue) it leaves room for a theory of evolution by natural selection, even if Aristotle himself never took that step. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the level of gender bias in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals while exercising due care in the analysis of its arguments. I argue that while the GA theory is clearly sexist, the traditional interpretation fails to diagnose the problem correctly. The traditional interpretation focuses on three main sources of evidence: (1) Aristotle’s claim that the female is, as it were, a “disabled” (πεπηρωμένον) male; (2) the claim at GA IV.3, 767b6-8 that females are (...) a departure from the kind; and (3) Aristotle’s supposed claim at GA IV.3, 768a21-8 that the most ideal outcome of reproduction is a male offspring that perfectly resembles its father. I argue that each of these passages has either been misunderstood or misrepresented by commentators. In none of these places is Aristotle suggesting that females are imperfect members of the species or that they result from the failure to achieve some teleological goal. I defend the view that the GA does not see reproduction as occurring for the sake of producing males; rather, what sex an embryo happens to become is determined entirely by non-teleological forces operating through material necessity. This interpretation is consistent with Aristotle’s view in GA II.5 that females have the same soul as the male (741a7) as well as the argument in Metaphysics X.9 that sexual difference is not part of the species form but is an affection (πάθος) arising from the matter (1058b21-4). While the traditional interpretation has tended to exaggerate the level of sexism in Aristotle’s
developmental biology, the GA is by no means free of gender bias as some recent scholarship has claimed. In the final section of the paper I point to one passage where Aristotle clearly falls back on sexist assumptions in order to answer the difficult question, “Why are animals divided into sexes?”. I argue that this passage in particular poses a serious challenge
to anyone attempting to absolve Aristotle’s developmental biology of the charge of sexism. (shrink)

This book consolidates emerging research on Aristotle's science and ethics in order to explore the extent to which the concepts, methods, and practices he developed for scientific inquiry and explanation are used to investigate moral phenomena. Each chapter shows, in a different way, that Aristotle's ethics is much more like a science than it is typically represented. The upshot of this is twofold. First, uncovering the links between Aristotle's science and ethics promises to open up new and innovative directions for (...) research into his moral philosophy. Second, showing why Aristotle thinks ethics can never be fully assimilated to the model of science will help shed new light on his views about the limits of science. The volume thus promises to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the epistemological, metaphysical, and psychological foundations of Aristotle's ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Aristotle’s views on natural kinds and the compatibility of pluralism and realism, a topic that has generated considerable interest among contemporary philosophers. I argue that, when it came to zoology, Aristotle denied that there is only one way of organizing the diversity of the living world into natural kinds that will yield a single, unified system of classification. Instead, living things can be grouped and regrouped into various cross-cutting kinds on the basis of objective similarities (...) and differences in ways that subserve the explanatory context. Since the explanatory aims of zoology are diverse and variegated, the kinds it recognizes must be equally diverse and variegated. At the same time, there are certain constraints on which kinds can be selected. And those constraints derive more from the causal structure of the world than from the proclivities of the classifier (hence the realism). This distinguishes Aristotle’s version of pluralistic realism from those contemporary versions (like Dupré’s “promiscuous realism”) that treat all or most classifications of a given domain as equally legitimate and not just a sub-set of kinds recognized by the science that studies it. By contrast, Aristotle privileges scientifically important kinds on the basis of their role in causal investigations. On this picture natural kinds are those kinds with the sort of causal structure that allows them to enter into scientific explanations. In the final section I argue that Aristotle’s zoology should remain of interest to philosophers and biologists alike insofar as it combines a pluralistic form of realism with a rank-free approach to classification. (shrink)

My objective is a better comprehension of two theoretically fundamental concepts. One, the concept of a substance in an ordinary (non-Aristotelian) sense, ranging over such things as salt, carbon, copper, iron, water, and methane – kinds of stuff that now count as (chemical) elements and compounds. The other I’ll call the object-concept in the abstract sense of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Frege in their logico-semantical enquiries. The material object-concept constitutes the heart of our received logico / ontic system, still massively influenced (...) by Aristotle after almost 2.5 millennia. On such an account, the fundamentality of material objects and their attributes are the metaphysical basis of the cosmos, as reflected in our received logic, Quine’s ‘canonical notation’ – derived via the empiricism of Russell from Frege’s function-based Begriffschrifft, and consisting of concrete singular terms and variables, quantifiers and predicate-expressions. The inadequacy of Frege’s approach to understanding concepts is reflected in his initial question. Frege enquires of ‘what it is that we are calling an object’, remarking that he regards a regular definition as impossible: “we have here something too simple to admit of logical analysis”. The imagined ultimacy or simplicity of the idea of a single object (arithmetically, just a unit – one as against two, three, four, etc.) as foundational to the calculus is just that – imagined. It is also guaranteed to block the comprehension of the substance-concept. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to motivate and defend a recognizable version of N. L. Wilson's "Principle of Charity" Doing so will involve: (1) distinguishing it fromthe significantly different versions of the Principle familiar through the work of Quine and Davidson; (2) showing that it is compatible with, among other things, both semantic externalism and "simulation" accounts of interpretation; and (3) explaining how it follows from plausible constraints relating to the connection between interpretation and self-interpretation. Finally, it will be (...) argued that Charity represents a type of "minimal individualism" that is closely tied to first person authority, and that endorsing Charity in our interpretations of others reflects a commitment to capturing, from the third-person starting point, their first-personal point of view. (shrink)

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature on (...) the purported ‘normativity’ of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the ‘finiteness’ of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as ‘normative’. In particular, the assumption that words have determinate meanings, more so than the assumption that they have ‘correctness’ conditions, rules out the possibility of understanding the relation between meaning and use in the more descriptive fashion commonly associated with dispositionalism. Nevertheless, if the relation of meaning and use is understood in a more normative key, responding to the meaning-skeptic with facts about one’s dispositions will turn out to be perfectly legitimate, though it will prevent one from being the sort of ‘dispositionalist’ that Kripke gives, without any real argument, a monopoly on disposition-based responses. (shrink)

Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's (...) terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well. (shrink)

William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by Cheryl Misak, (...) Robert Talisse, and Scott Aikin) that portrays him not as criticizing evidentialism itself, but only as trying to expand our conception what we should count as evidence. There are two main strategies for defending this ‘expansive’ reading. The first approach relies on showing that the logic of James’s argument itself relies on highlighting a new type of evidence rather than rather than undermining the need for our beliefs to be grounded in evidence, while the second approach appeals to aspects of James’s biography to show that he always intended something closer to the expansive reading. It is argued here that neither approach is persuasive, and that the anti-evidentialist reading of James remains the most probable. (shrink)

To the extent that William James had an account of ‘meaning,’ it is best captured in his “pragmatic maxim”, but James’s maxim has notoriously been open to many conflicting interpretations. It will be argued here that some of these interpretive difficulties stem from the fact that (1) James seriously understates the differences between his own views and those presented by Peirce in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, and (2) James’s understanding of the maxim typically ties meaning to truth, but (...) since James takes “truth” talk to stretch from “temporary” to “absolute” truth, a similar ‘elasticity’ can be found in his conception of meaning. However, this ‘elasticity’ is found in our everyday talk of meaning as well, and James manages to capture it in a more cohesive way than more contemporary accounts that often try to do so by positing two completely distinct types of meaning or content. (shrink)

Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius, who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree on (...) what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. I argue that their different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. In the final section of the paper I challenge the traditional view (dating back to Alexander's interpretation of Aristotle) that the use of automata in GA can simply be read off from their use in the de motu. (shrink)

This paper has three objectives. The first is to show how David Lewis' influential account of how a population is related to its language requires that speakers be 'conceptually autonomous' in a way that is incompatible with content ascriptions following from the assumption that its speakers share a language. The second objective is to sketch an alternate account of the psychological and sociological facts that relate a population to its language. The third is to suggest a modification of Lewis' account (...) of convention that will allow one to preserve the claim that there are conventions of language. (shrink)

This study constitutes an ethical analysis through the lens of distributive justice in the case of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was enacted in the midst of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. It begins by engaging with the visions of justice constructed by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, using their insights to locate the injustices of TARP according to their moral imaginations. However, this study argues that Rawls’ and Nozick’s theories of justice primarily envision the nature of law (...) as being restrictive of vice, not as instructors of virtue. Thus, it resources the legal philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to demonstrate how the positive pedagogy of law can enable a more just construction of economic rescue legislation, one that not only prevents future repetitions of economic vices and injustice, but is also formative for a society that prizes economic justice and virtues. In doing so, the study proposes two criteria for a more just consideration of economic rescue legislation that embraces law’s positive pedagogy. (shrink)

Coordination in thought is the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. Such treatment can be indirect, via an identity belief, or direct. Direct coordination presents a problem concerning how this treatment is justified. Dickie accounts for the justification of coordination in terms of aptness to a motivational state: coordination serves to fulfil a need to represent things outside the mind. I argue that this account gets the problem coordination presents wrong, and so does not (...) present an adequate solution. While the material of that account may be reconfigured to provide a more promising proposal, I argue that this depends on a specious psychology of belief, and will anyway end up being circular. I propose an account that, while similar in some ways, improves on both the official and reconfigured Dickie-style accounts, and points to some broader conclusions about the nature of rational cognition. (shrink)