Winning essay of the American Society for Aesthetics' inaugural Peter Kivy Prize. Extends Kivy's notion of sonic picturing through engagement with recent work in philosophy of perception. Argues that sonic pictures are more widespread and more aesthetically and artistically important than even Kivy envisioned. Topics discussed include: the nature of sonic pictures; the nature of sounds; what we can (and more importantly, cannot) conclude from musical listening; sonic pictures in film; beatboxing as an art of sonic picturing; and cover songs (...) as sonic pictures. To be published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman's distinction between autographic and allographic arts is appealing, we suggest, because it promises to resolve several prima facie puzzles. We consider and rebut a recent argument that alleges that digital images explode the autographic/allographic distinction. Regardless, there is another familiar problem with the distinction, especially as Goodman formulates it: it seems to entirely ignore an important sense in which all artworks are historical. We note in reply that some artworks can be considered both as historical products and as (...) formal structures. Talk about such works is ambiguous between the two conceptions. This allows us to recover Goodman's distinction: art forms that are ambiguous in this way are allographic. With that formulation settled, we argue that digital images are allographic. We conclude by considering the objection that digital photographs, unlike other digital images, would count as autographic by our criterion; we reply that this points to the vexed nature of photography rather than any problem with the distinction. (shrink)

The primary concern of our 2014 paper was not notation but the autographic/allographic distinction, not representations as such but works of art. As we see it, Zeimbekis's considerations do not ultimately undermine the position we advanced in 2014— but they do challenge an element of Goodman's own theory of notation that derives from his requirement of recoverability. That requirement can be abandoned without losing the explanatory power of the autographic/allographic distinction as we have refined it.

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...) is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Philip Booth’s ...and the Pursuit of Happiness: Wellbeing and the Role of Government. The book is an anthology of original articles by eminent researchers in modern happiness economics, such as: Booth himself; Paul Omerod; David Sacks, Betsey Stephenson, and Justin Wolfers; Christopher Snowden; J. R. Shackleton; Christian Bjornskov; Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne; and Pedro Schwartz. I conclude by offering several criticisms of the work.

Despite increased philosophical and psychological work on practical wisdom, contemporary interdisciplinary wisdom research provides few specifics about how to develop wisdom (Kristjánsson 2022). This lack of practically useful guidance is due in part to the difficulty of determining how to combine the tools of philosophy and psychology to develop a plausible account of wisdom as a prescriptive ideal. Modeling wisdom on more ordinary forms of expertise is promising, but skill models of wisdom (Annas 2011; De Caro et al. 2018; Swartwood (...) 2013b; Tsai 2023) have been challenged on the grounds that there are important differences between wisdom and expert skills (Hacker-Wright 2015, p. 986; Kristjánsson 2015, pp. 98, 101; Stichter 2015, 2016, 2018). I’ll argue that we can both vindicate the promise of skill models of wisdom and begin to specify practically useful strategies for wisdom development by attending to a reflective process that I call Case-Based Critical Reflection. I begin by demonstrating the process as it arose in a notable example from everyday life, illustrating how the process can be usefully applied to a case study of interest to wisdom scientists, and explaining its philosophical pedigree. After isolating the key features that make it relevant to wisdom development, I argue that attending to the importance of Critical Reflection can defuse prominent objections to skill models of wisdom. (shrink)

I argue that advocates of moderate epistemic idealization need some standards against which they can determine whether a particular individual P has a responsibility to acquire some specific piece of information α. Such a specification is necessary for the purpose of determining whether a reason R, the recognition of which depends on accounting for α, can legitimately be ascribed to P. To this end, I propose an initial sketch of a criterion that may be helpful in illuminating the conditions in (...) which P might be said to have a responsibility to take α into account when searching for reasons to act or believe. I worry that reason ascriptions that are based on information acquisition expectations which are not captured by this criterion may be open to charges of authoritarianism, especially when such a reason ascription prompts one person to demand that another act in a way that is responsive to the ascribed reason. (shrink)

Rationalization in the sense of biased self-justification is very familiar. It's not cheating because everyone else is doing it too. I didn't report the abuse because it wasn't my place. I understated my income this year because I paid too much in tax last year. I'm only a social smoker, so I won't get cancer. The mental mechanisms subserving rationalization have been studied closely by psychologists. However, when viewed against the backdrop of philosophical accounts of the regulative role of truth (...) in doxastic deliberation , rationalization can look very puzzling. Almost all contemporary philosophers endorse a version of the thesis of deliberative exclusivity—a thinker cannot in full consciousness decide whether to believe that p in a way that issues directly in forming a belief by adducing anything other than considerations that he or she regards as relevant to the truth of p. But, as I argue, rationalization involves the weighing of considerations that the thinker kn.. (shrink)

A response to critical commentaries. Crookston begins her commentary by noting that my book would have been better with answers to “the following three questions: (1) Why is the harm principle the right principle upon which to base a theory of toleration? (2) How is Cohen thinking of the concept of volenti? (p. x ) Is interference (i.e., the abandonment of toleration) ever morally required by the harm principle?” (p. x ). She is right, and I address these questions below (...) in Sections 2, 3, and 4. That is the bulk of this essay. I then turn to Kelley's issues in Sections 6, 7, and 8; these have to do with “the link between toleration and relativism,” the way I distinguish “the concepts of toleration and endurance,” and a “question about moral toleration” (p. x ). Despite much agreement, there are points of contention and I try to make my position clearer in response . (shrink)

Background: Individuals with psychopathic traits demonstrate an attenuated emotional response to aversive stimuli. However, recent evidence suggests heterogeneity in emotional reactivity among individuals with psychopathic or callous-unemotional (CU) traits, the emotional detachment dimension of psychopathy. We hypothesize that primary variants of psychopathy will respond with blunted affect to negatively valenced stimuli, whereas individuals marked with histories of childhood trauma/maltreatment exposure, known as secondary variants, will display heightened emotional reactivity. To test this hypothesis, the present study examined fear-potentiated startle between psychopathy (...) variants while viewing aversive, pleasant, and neutral scenes. Method: 238 incarcerated adolescent (M age = 16.8, SD = 1.11 years) boys completed a picture-startle paradigm and self-report questionnaires assessing CU traits, antisocial-aggressive behavior, and maltreatment. Results: Latent profile analyses identified four classes; primary variants (high CU traits, high aggression, low maltreatment; n = 46), secondary variants (high CU traits, high aggression, high maltreatment; n = 42), and two nonpsychopathic groups differentiated on maltreatment experience (n = 148). Findings from an ANOVA comparing identified groups on startle amplitude difference scores (i.e., aversive-neutral) suggested a main effect for group, F(3,196)=8.91, p<.001, η2 = .12. Primary variants of juvenile psychopathy displayed reduced startle potentiation to aversive images (threat and victim scenes), whereas secondary variants distinguished by high levels of childhood maltreatment did not. Conclusions: Findings add to a rapidly growing body of literature supporting the possibility of multiple developmental pathways to psychopathy (i.e., equifinality), and extend it by finding support for divergent potential biomarkers between primary and secondary psychopathy variants. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism (‘EC’), the view that the truth-values of knowledge attributions may vary with the context of ascription, has a variety of different linguistic implementations. On one of the implementations most popular in the early days of EC, the predicate ‘knows p’ functions semantically similarly to gradable adjectives such as ‘flat’, ‘tall’, or ‘empty’. In recent work Jason Stanley and John Hawthorne have presented powerful arguments against such implementations of EC. In this article I briefly systematize the contextualist analogy (...) to gradable adjectives, present Stanley’s argument against the analogy, and offer a contextualist response that abandons the analogy in favor of modeling the semantics of ‘knows p’ along the lines of quantifier expressions. I then present Hawthorne’s objection to the views presented, and finally conclude by outlining an argument to the effect that ‘knows p’ is an automatic indexical and as such to be expected to function differently from many other indexicals that the term has been compared to in the literature. I finally point out that no analogy should be expected to be perfect, and that no harm is done by postulating some unique behavior of ‘knows p’. (shrink)

Some of Dave Chappelle’s uses of storytelling about seemingly mundane events, like his experiences with his “white friend Chip” and the police, are examples of what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “Positive Propaganda.” This is in contrast to “Demagoguery,” the sort of propaganda described by Jason Stanley that obstructs empathic recognition of others, and undermines reasonable debate among citizens regarding policies that matter: the justice system, welfare, inequality, and race, for example. Some of Chappelle’s humor, especially in his most recent (...) Netflix specials, but also in his earlier standup performances and his series The Chappelle Show, is akin to art that appeals to emotion in the ways suggested by Du Bois in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926). Beauty is essential to art, but, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent” (p. 22). The “one side” is that which appears to extoll American ideals, but in reality undermines them, perpetuating the subordinate status of “the other”--black citizens. Replace “beauty” with “humor” or “funny”, and we see striking parallels between Chappelle’s socio-political performances and Du Bois’ call for positive propaganda, each of which constitute “civic rhetoric” broadly construed. We no longer live in Du Bois’ America of explicit denial of rights. In many ways our situation is worse, as the mechanisms of exclusion are implicit, difficult to dislodge, because they are invisible. Chappelles’ humor draws attention to subtle undermining-propaganda in our liberal democracy, transforming it through his counter-propaganda into the spectacle that it should be; ubiquitous democracy-denying propaganda should be as obvious to whites as it is to minorities. In his words, we should all see that “that shit is fucking incredible” (Killin’ Them Softly). (shrink)

Nelson Goodman notoriously distinguished between autographic works, whose instances should be identified by taking history of production into account, and allographic works, whose instances can be identified independently of history of production. Scholars such as Jerrold Levinson, Flint Schier, and Gregory Currie have criticized Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction arguing that all works are such that their instances should be identified by taking history of production into account. I will address this objection by exploiting David Davies’ distinction between e-instances and p-instances of (...) a work, thereby restating the autographic/allographic distinction. Then, I will show that this way of restating this distinction leads us to effective accounts of relevant related phenomena such as forgery, plagiarism, and digital technologies. Finally, I will show the theoretical advantages of my account of the autographic/allographic distinction in comparison with an alternative account recently proposed by Jason D’Cruz and P.D. Magnus. (shrink)

In their thought-provoking article, Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) defend the view that the status—both epistemic and ethical—of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) used in psychotherapy is complicated. While therapeutic CAI seems to be more than a mere tool implementing particular therapeutic techniques, it falls short of being a “digital therapist.” One of the main arguments supporting the latter claim is that even though “the interaction with CAI happens in the course of conversation… the conversation is profoundly different from a conversation with (...) a human therapist” (Sedlakova and Trachsel 2023, 8). In particular, unlike a human therapist, CAI cannot help its users gain new insight and self-understanding (Sedlakova and Trachsel 2023). We agree that currently available therapeutic CAI cannot be considered a “digital therapist,” however, we think that the issue surrounding the acquisition of new self-understanding in the interaction with therapeutic CAI is more complicated than Sedlakova and Trachsel suggest. (shrink)

Growing demand for broadly accessible mental health care, together with the rapid development of new technologies, trigger discussions about the feasibility of psychotherapeutic interventions based on interactions with Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI). Many authors argue that while currently available CAI can be a useful supplement for human-delivered psychotherapy, it is not yet capable of delivering fully fledged psychotherapy on its own. The goal of this paper is to investigate what are the most important obstacles on our way to developing CAI (...) systems capable of delivering psychotherapy in the future. To this end, we formulate and discuss three challenges central to this quest. Firstly, we might not be able to develop effective AI-based psychotherapy unless we deepen our understanding of what makes human-delivered psychotherapy effective. Secondly, assuming that it requires building a therapeutic relationship, it is not clear whether psychotherapy can be delivered by non-human agents. Thirdly, conducting psychotherapy might be a problem too complicated for narrow AI, i.e., AI proficient in dealing with only relatively simple and well-delineated tasks. If this is the case, we should not expect CAI to be capable of delivering fully-fledged psychotherapy until the so-called “general” or “human-like” AI is developed. While we believe that all these challenges can ultimately be overcome, we think that being mindful of them is crucial to ensure well-balanced and steady progress on our path to AI-based psychotherapy. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that the paucity of evidence for theism — along with basic assumptions about God's nature — is ipso facto evidence for atheism. The resulting argument has come to be known as the argument from divine hiddenness. Theists have challenged both the major and minor premises of the argument by offering defences. However, all of the major, contemporary defences are failures. What unites these failures is instructive: each is implausible given other commitments shared by everyone in the (...) debate or by theists in particular. Only challenges which are plausible given both common sense and other theistic commitments will undermine the argument from divine hiddenness. Given that such defences universally fail, the best hope for a successful challenge to the argument comes from more general sceptical responses. This sort of response is briefly sketched and defended against four independent objections. (shrink)

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle develops a theory of institutional facts and objects, of which money, borders and property are presented as prime examples. These objects are the result of us collectively intending certain natural objects to have a certain status, i.e. to ‘count as’ being certain social objects. This view renders such objects irreducible to natural objects. In this paper we propose a radically different approach that is more compatible with standard economic theory. We claim that (...) such institutional objects can be fully understood in terms of actions and incentives, and hence the Searlean apparatus solves a non-existent problem. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to show that there are many phenomena that pertain to the construction of truth-conditional compounds that follow characteristic patterns, and whose explanation requires appealing to knowledge structures organized in specific ways. We review a number of phenomena, ranging from non-homogenous modification and privative modification to polysemy and co-predication that indicate that knowledge structures do play a role in obtaining truth-conditions. After that, we show that several extant accounts that invoke rich lexical meanings to (...) explain such phenomena face problems related to inflexibility and lack of predictive power. We review different ways in which one might react to such problems as regards lexical meanings: go richer, go moderately richer, go thinner, and go moderately thinner. On the face of it, it looks like moderate positions are unstable, given the apparent lack of a clear cutoff point between the semantic and the conceptual, but also that a very thin view and a very rich view may turn out to be indistinguishable in the long run. As far as we can see, the most pressing open questions concern this last issue: can there be a principled semantic/world knowledge distinction? Where could it be drawn: at some upper level (e.g. enriched qualia structures) or at some basic level (e.g. constraints)? How do parsimony considerations affect these two different approaches? A thin meanings approach postulates intermediate representations whose role is not clear in the interpretive process, while a rich meanings approach to lexical meaning seems to duplicate representations: the same representations that are stored in the lexicon would form part of conceptual representations. Both types of parsimony problems would be solved by assuming a direct relation between word forms and (parts of) conceptual or world knowledge, leading to a view that has been attributed to Chomsky (e.g. by Katz 1980) in which there is just syntax and encyclopedic knowledge. (shrink)

In response to widespread doubts among professional philosophers (Russell, Horwich, Dietrich, McGinn, Chalmers), Stoljar argues for a ‘reasonable optimism’ about progress in philosophy. He defends the large and surprising claim that ‘there is progress on all or reasonably many of the big questions.’ However, Stoljar’s caveats and admitted avoidance of historical evidence permits overlooking persistent controversies in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that are essentially unchanged since the 17th Century. Stoljar suggests that his claims are commonplace in philosophy departments (...) and, indeed, the evidence I adduce constitutes an indictment of the widely shared view among professional analytic philosophers. (shrink)

Contemporary discussion concerning institutions focus on, and mostly accept, the Searlean view that institutional objects, i.e. money, borders and the like, exist in virtue of the fact that we collectively represent them as existing. A dissenting note has been sounded by Smit et al. (Econ Philos 27:1–22, 2011), who proposed the incentivized action view of institutional objects. On the incentivized action view, understanding a specific institution is a matter of understanding the specific actions that are associated with the institution and (...) how we are incentivized to perform these actions. In this paper we develop the incentivized action view by extending it to institutions like property, promises and complex financial organisations like companies. We also highlight exactly how the incentivized action view differs from the Searlean view, discuss the method appropriate to such study and discuss some of the virtues of the incentivized action view. (shrink)

Abstract: There is a long tradition of trying to analyze art either by providing a definition (essentialism) or by tracing its contours as an indefinable, open concept (anti-essentialism). Both art essentialists and art anti-essentialists share an implicit assumption of art concept monism. This article argues that this assumption is a mistake. Species concept pluralism—a well-explored position in philosophy of biology—provides a model for art concept pluralism. The article explores the conditions under which concept pluralism is appropriate, and argues that they (...) obtain for art. Art concept pluralism allows us to recognize that different art concepts are useful for different purposes, and what has been feuding definitions can be seen as characterizations of specific art concepts. (shrink)

What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are (...) best interpreted as implementing the same basic protocol. Money, i.e. the thing that we coordinate on acquiring in order to lower our transaction costs, is, in all cases, a set of positions on an abstract mathematical object, namely a relative ratio scale. The things that we ordinarily call ‘money’ are merely records of positions on such a scale. (shrink)

John Norton says that philosophers have been led astray for thousands of years by their attempt to treat induction formally. He is correct that such an attempt has caused no end of trouble, but he is wrong about the history. There is a rich tradition of non-formal induction. In fact, material theories of induction prevailed all through antiquity and from the Renaissance to the mid-1800s. Recovering these past systems would not only fill lacunae in Norton’s own theory but would highlight (...) areas where Norton has not freed himself from the straightjacket of formal induction as much as he might think. This essay begins that recovery. (shrink)

Beliefs have genealogies. Can tracing a belief’s genealogy illuminate the epistemic quality of the belief? This paper sets out a general epistemology of genealogies. As it turns out, genealogies for beliefs come in two sorts: those that trace a belief to some mental event that doubles as evidence for the belief and those that do not. The former have the potential to undercut the belief, rebut the belief, or—importantly—both. The latter have the potential to reinforce the belief or rebut the (...) belief but—importantly—not undercut it. The ultimate conclusion is that there is a role for genealogies in the epistemic appraisal of our beliefs, but this role will be circumscribed by the availability of clear and compelling genealogies. (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)

Like William James before him, Huw Price has influentially argued that truth has a normative role to play in our thought and talk. I agree. But Price also thinks that we should regard truth-conceived of as property of our beliefs-as something like a metaphysical myth. Here I disagree. In this paper, I argue that reflection on truth's values pushes us in a slightly different direction, one that opens the door to certain metaphysical possibilities that even a Pricean pragmatist can love.

Joshua Greene argues that cognitive (neuro)science matters for ethics in two ways, the “direct route” and the “indirect route.” Greene illustrates the direct route with a debunking explanation of the inclination to condemn all incest. The indirect route is an updated version of Greene’s argument that dual-process moral psychology gives support for consequentialism over deontology. I consider each of Greene’s arguments, and I argue that neither succeeds. If there is a route from cognitive (neuro)science to ethics, Greene has not found (...) it. (shrink)

Cover versions form a loose but identifiable category of tracks and performances. We distinguish four kinds of covers and argue that they mark important differences in the modes of evaluation that are possible or appropriate for each: mimic covers, which aim merely to echo the canonical track; rendition covers, which change the sound of the canonical track; transformative covers, which diverge so much as to instantiate a distinct, albeit derivative song; and referential covers, which not only instantiate a distinct song, (...) but for which the new song is in part about the original song. In order to allow for the very possibility of transformative and referential covers, we argue that a cover is characterized by relation to a canonical track rather than merely by being a new instance of a song that had been recorded previously. (shrink)

We explain why exactly the simplified abstract scheme of reality within the standard science paradigm cannot provide the consistent picture of “truly fundamental” reality and how the unreduced, causally complete description of the latter is regained within the extended, provably complete solution to arbitrary interaction problem and the ensuing concept of universal dynamic complexity. We emphasize the practical importance of this extension for both particular problem solution and further, now basically unlimited fundamental science development (otherwise dangerously stagnating within its traditional (...) paradigm). (shrink)

Nature, according to Cavendish, has “an Infinite Natural power, that is, a power to produce infinite effects in her own self, by infinite changes of Motions.” While Cavendish mentions powers with respect to human beings, medicines, occasional causes, and other entities, these powers are really just the power of self-moving matter to cause changes in the world. This chapter examines why Cavendish attributes the power of self-motion to matter, what this power is, how it arose, how it is enacted, and (...) its limitations. In doing so, it discusses her views on causation, perception, and motion, and argues that motion is not reducible to change in mereological facts. (shrink)

Don Marquis’ future-like-ours account argues that abortion is seriously immoral because itdeprives the embryo or fetus of a valuable future much like our own. Marquis was mindful ofcontraception being reductio ad absurdum of his reasoning, and argued that prior tofertilisation, there is not an identifiable subject of harm. Contra Marquis, Tomer Chaffercontends that the ovum is a plausible subject of harm, and therefore contraception deprives theovum of a future-like-ours. In response, I argue that being an identifiable subject of harm is (...) notsufficient for Marquis’ argument to succeed. In addition, we must also share our identity withan ovum. I show that on the account of personal identity utilised by Marquis’ defenders, weare not identical with an ovum. As a result, Chaffer’s reductio fails. (shrink)

Composite materialism, as I will understand it, is the view that human persons are composite material objects. This paper develops and investigates an argument, The Vague Singulars Argument, for the falsity of composite materialism. We shall see that cogent or not, the Vague Singulars Argument has philosophically significant ramifications.

Although Alston believed epistemically circular arguments were able to justify their conclusions, he was also disquieted by them. We will argue that Alston was right to be disquieted. We explain Alston’s view of epistemic circularity, the considerations that led him to accept it, and the purposes he thought epistemically circular arguments could serve. We then build on some of Alston’s remarks and introduce further limits to the usefulness of such arguments and introduce a new problem that stems from those limits. (...) The upshot is that adopting Alston’s view that epistemically circular arguments can be used to justify their conclusions is more costly than even he thought. (shrink)

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. Recent (...) scholarship is so steeped in the first-mentioned tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. In this essay McCaskey seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself. The examination is both historical and philosophical. The first part of the essay fills out the history. The latter part examines the most mature of the philosophies in the Socratic tradition, specifically Bacon’s and Whewell’s. After tracing out this tradition, McCaskey shows how this alternate view of induction is indeed employed in science, as exemplified by several instances taken from actual scientific practice. In this manner, McCaskey proposes to us that the Humean problem of induction is merely an artifact of a bad conception of induction and that a return to the Socratic conception might be warranted. (shrink)

Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not because favoring is (...) a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something just because she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason. (shrink)

I-theories of bare demonstratives take the semantic referent of a demonstrative to be determined by an inner state of the utterer. E-theories take the referent to be determined by factors external to the utterer. I argue that, on the Standard view of communication, neither of these theories can be right. Firstly, both are committed to the existence of conventions with superfluous content. Secondly, any claim to the effect that a speaker employs the conventions associated with these theories cannot have any (...) content, i.e. nothing can count as following these conventions. Bare demonstratives may well not be devices of semantic reference at all, i.e. may not actually contribute a referent to the proposition semantically expressed by an utterance. (shrink)

The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its corresponding COVID-19 is challenging national preparedness and response ability to pandemics. No one is prepared well, but governments around the world must respond as effectively and efficiently as possible to pandemics, and every occurrence of such worldwide disease must be a lesson for preparedness. While plans and programs may be in place to arrest the rapid spread of the virus, the success of any state intervention relies much on how cohesive the society is, (...) how trusting the people are, and how trustworthy the government is. Social cohesion begets trust, and trust engenders obedience and calm. The absence of social cohesion produces social unrest and social erosion, lack or absence of social trust creates risk societies, disobedience. When these conditions exist, the spread of a virus is inevitable. Furthermore, they create a pandemic of confusion and fear, of stigmatization and discrimination. The ways that nations respond to the pandemic today and how the society responds to state actions will principally determine their lots and destinies in the next decades or even in the next elections. The pandemic reveals the quality of leaders and people a nation has. Governments that are successful at controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and minimizing fatalities of COVID-19 will enjoy even more social cohesion and public trust, while those that deferred vigorous interventions to control its spread will see greater social stress and distrust, resulting in the paralyzation of the public’s faith in leaders and government institutions. (shrink)

Declarations like “this meeting is adjourned” make certain facts the case by representing them as being the case. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the mechanism whereby the utterance of a declaration can bring about a new state of affairs. In this paper, we use the incentivization account of institutional facts to address this issue. We argue that declarations can serve to bring about new states of affairs as their utterance have game theoretical import, typically in virtue of (...) the utterer signaling a commitment to act in an incentive-changing way. (shrink)

Antiquated Classical pictures of the universe have been formative in shaping the modern idea that, to the extent change is caused, it is fixed in advance. This idea has played a role in making it seem to many that what we are discovering through science supports the exclusion of free will from models for the relevant neural and bodily changes. I argue that giving up this unwarranted notion about causation opens us to the likelihood that how a person expresses free (...) will offers unique explanatory value. I then briefly discuss some further issues with either including or excluding expressions of free will from our explanations, as well as some implications for AI and everyday life. (shrink)

One popular theodicy says that good can’t exist without evil, and so God must allow evil in order to allow good. Call this the counterpart theodicy. The counterpart theodicy relies on a metaphysical claim about existence—good cannot exist without evil. A second popular theodicy says that we would be unable to know/recognize/appreciate the good without evil, and so God is forced to allow evil in order to allow for such appreciation. Call this the appreciation theodicy. The appreciation theodicy relies on (...) an epistemological claim about recognition or appreciation—we are unable to know/recognize/appreciate good without evil (even if it is possible for good to exist without evil). Determining whether either of these theodicies is a success requires a careful discussion of whether either meets the conditions on a successful theodicy. I argue that both fail. (shrink)

I defend a new reading of Spinoza's account of causation that reconciles the strengths of the mechanist and formal cause interpretations by locating instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws inside individual natures; natures are efficacious because that's where the laws are. God's necessity, for instance, follows from certain logical principles contained within God's nature. Causes between finite particulars likewise stem entirely from finite natures. They do so, I argue, because finite instances of nature's fixed and unchanging laws are inscribed (...) within those natures. In each of these instances, effects follow from natures on account of laws contained within them. (shrink)

Two-tiered mixed theories of punishment hold that legislatures should act according to consequentialism, but the judiciary should act according to retributivism. A major motivation for these theories is wanting to preserve the idea that punishment is ultimately justified on consequentialist grounds, without falling prey to the Punishing the Innocent objection. Yet this benefit is illusory. While two-tiered mixed theories successfully avoid the Punishing the Innocent objection narrowly construed, they do not successfully escape the point behind it. This is because cases (...) can be constructed with the same problems as those used to describe the classic Punishing the Innocent objection, just bumped up to the legislature. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the emerging field of comparative metaethics by offering a reconstruction of the metaethical views implicit to the Daoist classic, the Laozi 老子 or Daodejing 道德經. It offers two novel views developed out of the Laozi: one-all value monism and moral trivialism. The paper proceeds by discussing Brook Ziporyn’s reading of the Laozi in terms of omnipresence and irony, and then applies his reading to moral properties like values and names (ming 名). The paper emboldens Ziporyn’s monistic (...) tendencies in order to claim that the Laozi not only treats the Dao as an omnipresent value, but also as the one value that is all values. I call this view one-all value monism. I then argue that, in terms of moral epistemology, one-all value monism entails moral trivialism, the view that all moral judgments are true. I conclude by emphasizing the therapeutic motivation for holding such apparently outrageous metaethical views. The paper thus defends the basic claim that there is a point at which Ziporyn’s omnipresence and irony become monism and true contradiction, and that further exploring the consequences of these inevitable transitions leads to the discovery of novel metaethical views. (shrink)

In this article, I set forth a theory of propaganda explaining what it is, how it relates to marketing, and the nature and types of ideology. I discuss the criteria by which we can judge the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda. I defend the view that while propaganda can be perfectly rational, it rarely is, and I explain why that is the case. I finish by explaining why the question of the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda is different from the (...) question of the morality of propaganda. I give two quick examples of how an ethicist might argue that deceptive propaganda might be ethical to use, and perfectly rational propaganda might be immoral to use. I conclude with the notion that the question of the ethics of marketing and propaganda is complex, and should be handled in a separate paper. (shrink)

This essay is an analysis of the central arguments in Plato’s Crito. The dialogue shows, in a variety of ways, that the opinion of another person can have practical relevance in one’s deliberations about what to do – e.g. as an argument, as a piece of expert advice, as a threat. Especially important among these forms of practical relevance is the relevance of authoritative commands. In the dialogue, the Laws of Athens argue that Socrates must accept his sentence of death, (...) because he must regard the court’s verdict as a command from a practical authority – the city. The Laws’ arguments rely on special features of authority-reasons that many commentators have overlooked. This article explains why the Law’s arguments are unsuccessful. Finally, it is argued that Socrates’ description of ‘the many’ suggests that the city lacks the deliberative capacity necessary for possessing practical authority. (shrink)

The term ‘propaganda’ is normally taken in the pejorative sense of deceitful messaging. Propaganda is considered dubious if it is produced by a government agency, especially by a ministry of war or propaganda. In this article, I apply the theory of propaganda I sketched in a prior piece in these pages, under which propaganda is simply messaging intended to persuade others to do something or to support something. Under this theory, propaganda is reasonable if but only if it is evidence-based, (...) truthful, broadly logical, not coercive, targeted at mentally competent adults, and transparent—meaning that the audience should be aware that the message is intended to persuade them to do or support something. I then examine three WWII-era government propaganda films, one—A Defeated People (1946)—produced by the British military, and two—The Negro Soldier (1944) and Teamwork (1947)—produced by the American military. I explain first why I chose these particular films. I then analyze these films in some detail and show that while they were not perfectly rational, they all effectively conveyed the persuasive message that the respective militaries wanted to convey. And they did this by meeting all of the criteria for propaganda to be rational. (shrink)

Libertarians tend to noninterventionists on moral grounds, for which the simplest argument is national sovereignty. Yet, as some have argued, national sovereignty sits uncomfortably with libertarians’ moral individualism. I affirm the interventionists’ rejection of national sovereignty, but offer several reasons for why applying libertarians’ moral individualism to actual wars requires noninterventionism. The first is collateral damage that cannot be justified given interventions’ consistently low probability of success. The second is that creating war zones imposes terror and harm on everyone within (...) a given area, regardless of whether they actually get killed or injured themselves. The third is that a general policy of intervention, and the standing army it requires, has recurring perverse effects on both the intervening country’s population and the world more generally. I then argue that the points raised here against intervention apply to all war, not just interventions, albeit weakened, and distinguish the resulting anti-war position from pacifism. (shrink)

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral. The critics of this solution asked 'whose side are we on?' Burawoy provides a novel justification for advocacy scholarship in sociology. Public sociology is intended to have political effects, but also to be funded by (...) the politically neutral state. He argues that public sociology is institutionally neutral, but that committing to an organic relation with a social movement is legitimate as a matter of the sociologist's personal value choice. Although this produces side-taking sociology, by improving the case for particular standpoints it serves to improve democratic discussion generally, which is an appropriately neutral public aim. (shrink)