We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the first participatory budgeting experiment in the United States, in Chicago's 49th Ward. There are two avenues of inquiry: First, does participatory budgeting result in different budgetary priorities than standard practices? Second, do projects meet normative social justice outcomes? It is clear that allowing citizens to determine municipal budget projects results in very different outcomes than standard procedures. Importantly, citizens in the 49th Ward consistently choose projects that the research literature classifies as low (...) priority. The results are mixed, however, when it comes to social justice outcomes. While there is no clear pattern in which projects are located only in affluent sections of the ward, there is evidence of geographic clustering. Select areas are awarded projects like community gardens, dog parks, and playgrounds, while others are limited to street resurfacing, sidewalk repairs, bike racks, and bike lanes. Based on our findings, we offer suggestions for future programmatic changes. (shrink)

Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.

In the _True Intellectual System_, Cudworth attacks types of atheist position—atomic atheism, hylozoic atheism, etc. He generally uses ancient examples to illustrate those types, but also criticizes some of his contemporaries. We can identify direct criticisms of contemporaries by finding quotations, paraphrases, and accounts of their views in the text. My primary question in this paper is, 'how much of the _True Intellectual System_ is directly about or aimed at Spinoza?' My ultimate answer, contrary to some prominent voices in the (...) existing literature, is 'not very much at all'. (shrink)

I provide a characterization of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions---that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of acyclic relations---in terms of hyper-relations satisfying certain properties. For those hyper-relations Nehring calls extended preference relations, the central characterizing condition is weaker than (hyper-relation) transitivity but stronger than (hyper-relation) acyclicity. Furthermore, the relevant type of hyper-relation can be represented as the intersection of a certain class of its extensions. These results generalize known, analogous results for path independent choice functions.

In this article, I argue that Immanuel Kant fails to provide a satisfactory account of ‘moral debt’ in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. More precisely, he fails to answer the question of why we should assume that a debt exists in the first place. In light of recent scholarship on this area of his thought, I sketch some possible readings of Kant on the nature of moral transformation that suggest how he might account for this debt. I then (...) argue that these accounts fail to justify its existence within Kant's project. (shrink)

In the face of an impossibility result, some assumption must be relaxed. The Mere Addition Paradox is an impossibility result in population ethics. Here, I explore substantially weakening the decision-theoretic assumptions involved. The central finding is that the Mere Addition Paradox persists even in the general framework of choice functions when we assume Path Independence as a minimal decision-theoretic constraint. Choice functions can be thought of either as generalizing the standard axiological assumption of a binary “betterness” relation, or as providing (...) a general framework for a normative (rather than axiological) theory of population ethics. Path Independence, a weaker assumption than typically (implicitly) made in population ethics, expresses the idea that, in making a choice from a set of alternatives, the order in which options are assessed or considered is ethically arbitrary and should not affect the final choice. Since the result establishes a conflict between the relevant ethical principles and even very weak decision-theoretic principles, we have more reason to doubt the ethical principles. (shrink)

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the (...) developmental process has been shaped by a yet larger evolutionary dynamic that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary dynamic has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the developmental process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition. (shrink)

In many assessment problems—aptitude testing, hiring decisions, appraisals of the risk of recidivism, evaluation of the credibility of testimonial sources, and so on—the fair treatment of different groups of individuals is an important goal. But individuals can be legitimately grouped in many different ways. Using a framework and fairness constraints explored in research on algorithmic fairness, I show that eliminating certain forms of bias across groups for one way of classifying individuals can make it impossible to eliminate such bias across (...) groups for another way of dividing people up. And this point generalizes if we require merely that assessments be approximately bias-free. Moreover, even if the fairness constraints are satisfied for some given partitions of the population, the constraints can fail for the coarsest common refinement, that is, the partition generated by taking intersections of the elements of these coarser partitions. This shows that these prominent fairness constraints admit the possibility of forms of intersectional bias. (shrink)

There is a theorem that shows that it is impossible for an algorithm to jointly satisfy the statistical fairness criteria of Calibration and Equalised Odds non-trivially. But what about the recently advocated alternative to Calibration, Base Rate Tracking? Here, we show that Base Rate Tracking is strictly weaker than Calibration, and then take up the question of whether it is possible to jointly satisfy Base Rate Tracking and Equalised Odds in non-trivial scenarios. We show that it is not, thereby establishing (...) an even more general impossibility theorem. (shrink)

The precautionary principle is invoked in a number of important personal and policy decision contexts. Peterson shows that certain ways of making the principle precise are inconsistent with other criteria of decision-making. Some object that the results do not apply to cases of deep uncertainty or value incommensurability which are alleged to be in the principle’s wheelhouse. First, I show that Peterson’s impossibility results can be generalized considerably to cover cases of both deep uncertainty and incommensurability. Second, I contrast an (...) alternative way of giving voice to the precautionary impulse. (shrink)

I consider statistical criteria of algorithmic fairness from the perspective of the _ideals_ of fairness to which these criteria are committed. I distinguish and describe three theoretical roles such ideals might play. The usefulness of this program is illustrated by taking Base Rate Tracking and its ratio variant as a case study. I identify and compare the ideals of these two criteria, then consider them in each of the aforementioned three roles for ideals. This ideals program may present a way (...) forward in the normative evaluation of candidate statistical criteria of algorithmic fairness. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy overcomes the opposition between scientific optimism and Schopenhauerian pessimism with the image of a music-making Socrates, who symbolizes the aesthetic affirmation of life. This article shows how the aesthetic ideal is an illusion whose metaphysical solace undermines itself in being recognized as such, thereby ceasing to be comforting. While I agree with recent commentaries that contest the pervasive Schopenhauerian reading of The Birth, most of these commentaries still support the view that Nietzsche wishes to communicate some (...) fundamental truth about nature or meaning in life. By contrast, I argue that he treats any such truth as a cultural fiction that emerges from the poetic staging of reality, leaving us with a contradiction of appearances deprived of any intelligible ground. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss how Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism concerns the complicity between Christian morality and modern atheism. I unpack in what sense Schopenhauer’s ascetic denial of the will signifies a return to nothingness, what he calls the nihil negativum. I argue that Nietzsche’s formulation of nihilism specifically targets Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the culmination of the Western metaphysical tradition, the crucial stage of its intellectual history in which the scientific pursuit of truth finally unveils the ascetic will to nothingness (...) that motivates it. I contend that Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer anticipates current scholarly debates around the significance of the nihil negativum and offers a compelling objection against contemporary proponents of philosophical nihilism such as Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier. (shrink)

Can a human society be constrained in such a way that self-organization will thereafter tend to produce outcomes that advance the goals of the society? Such a society would be self-organizing in the sense that individuals who pursue only their own interests would none-the-less act in the interests of the society as a whole, irrespective of any intention to do so. The paper sketches an agent-based model that identifies the conditions that must be met if such a self-organizing society is (...) to emerge. The model draws heavily on an understanding of how self-organizing societies have emerged repeatedly during the evolution of life on Earth. The model demonstrates that the key enabling requirement for a self-organizing society is ‘consequence-capture’. Broadly this means that all agents in the society must capture sufficient of the beneficial consequences of their actions for the goals of the society. ‘Consequence-capture’ can be organized in a society by appropriate management that suppresses free riders and supports pro-social actions. In human societies these constraints include institutions such as systems of governance and social norms. If a self-organizing society is to emerge, consequence-capture must apply to all agents in the society, including those involved in the establishment and adaptation of institutions. If this is achieved, the result will be a fully self-organizing society in which the interests of all agents are aligned with the interests of the society as a whole. (shrink)

This chapter considers Ralph Cudworth as a philosophical critic of Hobbes. Cudworth saw Hobbes as a representative of the three views he was attacking: atheism, determinism, and the denial that morality is eternal and immutable. Moreover, he did not just criticize Hobbes by assuming that a general critique of those views applied to Hobbes’s particular case. Rather, he singled out Hobbes, often by quoting him, and argued against the distinctively Hobbesian positions he had identified. In this chapter I look at (...) Cudworth as a critic of Hobbes in two of the three central areas, atheism and ethics, focusing on passages where we see him explicitly picking out Hobbes. (shrink)

Early modern debates about the nature of matter interacted with debates about whether matter could think. In particular, some philosophers (e.g., Cudworth and Leibniz) objected to materialism about the human mind on the grounds that matter is passive, thinking things are active, and one cannot make an active thing out of passive material. This paper begins by looking at two seventeenth-century materialist views (Hobbes’s, and one suggested but not endorsed by Locke) before considering that objection (which I call here the (...) Activity Argument). In discussion, I note that several philosophers of the time believed that matter was active. That view opens up a possible response to the Activity Argument. The paper concludes by looking at the views of two materialists of the time who also believed that matter was active, Toland and Cavendish. (shrink)

In his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals David Hume said that a group of earlier modern philosophers, beginning with Malebranche, held that morality was founded on relations. In this paper I follow up on that suggestion by investigating pre-Humean views in moral philosophy according to which morality is founded on relations. I do that by looking at the work of Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke. Each of them talked prominently about relations in their accounts of basic aspects (...) of morality. Beyond that, each of them turns out to have held both metaphysical and epistemological views that might be described as founding morality on relations. Despite the definite differences between the three philosophers’ approaches, Hume does seem to have noticed a genuine connection here—even though he himself tended to ignore significant versions of this approach when criticizing it. (shrink)

I discuss Hume's views about whether simplicity and generality are positive features of explanations. In criticizing Hobbes and others who base their systems of morality on self interest, Hume diagnoses their errors as resulting from a "love of simplicity". These worries about whether simplicity is a positive feature of explanations emerge in Hume's thinking over time. But Hume does not completely reject the idea that it's good to seek simple explanations. What Hume thinks we need is good judgment about when (...) we are going too far in our search for simple explanations. These worries about simplicity are not unique to Hume. We can see versions of them in the work of Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) held a number of surprising philosophical views. These included a materialist panpsychism, and some views in what we might call environmental ethics. Panpsychism, though certainly not unheard of, is still often a surprising view. Views in environmental ethics - even just views that involve a measure of environmental concern - are unusual to find in early modern European philosophy. Cavendish held both of these surprising views. One might suspect that panpsychism provides some reasons for environmental concern. I (...) argue, however, that Cavendish did not derive her environmental ethics from her panpsychism. If there is a connection, it is a developmental one, leading from the ethics to the panpsychism. The investigation of these issues also provides an occasion for thinking more generally about how Cavendish's views fit together, and whether she developed a systematic philosophy in the manner of several of her contemporaries. (shrink)

Our aim here is to present a result that connects some approaches to justifying countable additivity. This result allows us to better understand the force of a recent argument for countable additivity due to Easwaran. We have two main points. First, Easwaran’s argument in favour of countable additivity should have little persuasive force on those permissive probabilists who have already made their peace with violations of conglomerability. As our result shows, Easwaran’s main premiss – the comparative principle – is strictly (...) stronger than conglomerability. Second, with the connections between the comparative principle and other probabilistic concepts clearly in view, we point out that opponents of countable additivity can still make a case that countable additivity is an arbitrary stopping point between finite and full additivity. (shrink)

Leibniz's mill argument in 'Monadology' 17 is a well-known but puzzling argument against materialism about the mind. I approach the mill argument by considering other places where Leibniz gave similar arguments, using the same example of the machinery of a mill and reaching the same anti-materialist conclusion. In a 1702 letter to Bayle, Leibniz gave a mill argument that moves from his definition of perception (as the expression of a multitude by a simple) to the anti-materialist conclusion. Soon afterwards, in (...) the Preface to the New Essays, Leibniz gave a different mill argument. That argument depends upon there being no arbitrary and inexplicable connections in nature, because God would not create such things. Later, in the 'Monadology', Leibniz again used the mill example in arguing against materialism. That passage too, I argue, uses an argument from inexplicability rather than from Leibniz's definition of perception. (shrink)

This chapter looks at the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, and then at parts of the Anglophone reaction to those discussions. It considers the early criticisms of Locke by Edward Stillingfleet and the anonymous author of three sets of Remarks on Locke’s Essay. It then looks at some other ways in which readers reacted to Locke’s discussions: the views of Anthony Collins and John Toland, which one might be tempted to think of as Lockean materialism; (...) William Carroll’s reading of Locke as a Spinozistic materialist; and the dualistic Lockeanism of William Duncan’s Lockean logic textbook. (shrink)

According to Richard Gelwick, one of the fundamental implications of Polanyi’s epistemology is that all intellectual disciplines are inherently heuristic. This article draws out the implications of a heuristic vision of theology latent in Polanyi’s thought by placing contemporary theologian David Brown’s dynamic understanding of tradition, imagination, and revelation in the context of a Polanyian-inspired vision of reality. Consequently, such a theology will follow the example of science, reimagining its task as one of discovery rather than mere reflection on a (...) timeless body of divine revelation. The ongoing development of a theological tradition thus involves the attempt to bring one’s understanding of the question of God to bear on the whole of the human experience. The pursuit of theology as a heuristic endeavor is a bold attempt to construct an integrated vision of nothing less than the entirety of all that is, without absolutizing one’s vision, and without giving up on the question of truth. (shrink)

For two ideally rational agents, does learning a finite amount of shared evidence necessitate agreement? No. But does it at least guard against belief polarization, the case in which their opinions get further apart? No. OK, but are rational agents guaranteed to avoid polarization if they have access to an infinite, increasing stream of shared evidence? No.

Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between (...) the notations acceptable for computation, the usual idealizations involved in theories of computability, flowing from Alan Turing’s monumental work, and de re propositional attitudes toward numbers and other mathematical objects. (shrink)

This paper generalizes rationalizability of a choice function by a single acyclic binary relation to rationalizability by a set of such relations. Rather than selecting those options in a menu that are maximal with respect to a single binary relation, a weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice function selects those options that are maximal with respect to at least one binary relation in a given set. I characterize the class of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions in terms of simple functional properties. This result also (...) generalizes Aizerman and Malishevski's characterization of pseudo-rationalizable choice functions, that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of total orders. (shrink)

This paper discusses the materialist views of Margaret Cavendish, focusing on the relationships between her views and those of two of her contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes and Henry More. It argues for two main claims. First, Cavendish's views sit, often rather neatly, between those of Hobbes and More. She agreed with Hobbes on some issues and More on others, while carving out a distinctive alternative view. Secondly, the exchange between Hobbes, More, and Cavendish illustrates a more general puzzle about just what (...) divided materialists from their opponents. Seemingly straightforward disagreements about whether incorporeal substances exist turn out to be more complex ones in which the nature of those things is disputed at the same time as their existence. (shrink)

Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Initial subjectivity, the line goes, is of mere transient significance, giving way to intersubjective agreement eventually. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures that are updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. (...) We also show that such sets converge to a shared, maximally informed opinion. Convergence to a maximally informed opinion is a (weak) Jeffrey conditioning analogue of Bayesian “convergence to the truth” for conditional probabilities. Finally, we demonstrate the philosophical significance of our study by detailing applications to the topics of dynamic coherence, imprecise probabilities, and probabilistic opinion pooling. (shrink)

The Evolutionary Manifesto shows that evolution is directional and demonstrates that this has major implications for humanity. The Manifesto shows that humanity must align its social systems and behaviour with the trajectory of evolution if we are to survive and thrive into the future. The Manifesto goes on to demonstrate that humanity has an essential role to play in the future evolution of life on this planet. It demonstrates that life on Earth has reached a critical stage in evolution’s trajectory. (...) Up to now evolution has moved along its trajectory blindly and unconsciously. But if evolution on Earth is to continue to advance successfully in the future, the process will have to be driven intentionally and consciously by humanity. In this way, a proper understanding of evolution shows us how we can live a life that matters in a larger scheme of things. An evolutionary worldview answers the fundamental existential question that faces us all: “What should I do with my life?” The Manifesto outlines in broad terms what humanity must do to advance the evolutionary process—how we will intentionally have to re-make our political, social and economic systems, and how we will need to develop our cognition and consciousness. As such, the Manifesto presents a detailed case for evolutionary activism--coordinated action directed at advancing the evolutionary process intentionally. (shrink)

This paper investigates Locke’s views about materialism, by looking at the discussion in Essay IV.x. There Locke---after giving a cosmological argument for the existence of God---argues that God could not be material, and that matter alone could never produce thought. In discussing the chapter, I pay particular attention to some comparisons between Locke’s position and those of two other seventeenth-century philosophers, René Descartes and Ralph Cudworth. -/- Making use of those comparisons, I argue for two main claims. The first is (...) that the important argument of Essay IV.x.10 is fundamentally an argument about the causation of perfections. Indeed, Locke gives multiple such arguments in the chapter. My second main claim is that my proposed reading of IV.x is not merely consistent with what Locke says elsewhere about superaddition, but also provides reasons to favor a particular understanding of what superaddition is. (shrink)

Hofweber (Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a thesis he calls “internalism” with respect to natural number discourse: no expressions purporting to refer to natural numbers in fact refer, and no apparent quantification over natural numbers actually involves quantification over natural numbers as objects. He argues that while internalism leaves open the question of whether other kinds of abstracta exist, it precludes the existence of natural numbers, thus establishing what he calls “restricted nominalism” about (...) natural numbers. We argue that Hofweber’s internalism fails to establish restricted nominalism. Not only is his primary argument for restricted nominalism invalid, the analysis of quantification proposed threatens to collapse internalism into either a traditional form of error theory or realism. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes often includes powers and abilities in his descriptions of the world. Meanwhile, Hobbes’s philosophical picture of the world appears quite reductive, and he seems sometimes to say that nothing exists but bodies in motion. In more extreme versions of such a picture, there would be no room for powers. Hobbes is not an eliminativist about powers, but his view does tend toward ontological minimalism. It would be good to have an account of what Hobbes thinks powers are, and (...) how they fit into his understanding of the world. In this chapter, I investigate Hobbes’s account of the metaphysics of powers and abilities. Section 1 considers three important aspects of Hobbes’s account of powers: the connection between powers and causes; the modal aspects of powers; and the connection between powers and motions. Sections 2 and 3 then consider interpretive arguments about whether Hobbes identifies powers with underlying corporeal features. (shrink)

In the early years of the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included, from 1702 to 1704, discussions of materialism. Those discussions culminated with the consideration of Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena, where Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. In this paper I argue for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. The first is that, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Serena a (...) Spinozist, we can make better sense of him as a sort of Hobbesian materialist. The second main point concerns reasons for materialism, and in particular a story Locke tells in the Essay about materialists' motives. Toland defends his materialism by arguing that matter is active, and argues that matter is active by using a conceivability argument. But this is not the crude conceivability argument that Locke suggests motivates materialists. This (together with reflecting on some of Hobbes's arguments) suggests that we might well tell a Lockean story about reasons for early modern materialism, but not Locke's story. (shrink)

I argue that Hobbes isn't really a materialist in the early 1640s (in, e.g., the Third Objections to Descartes's Meditations). That is, he doesn't assert that bodies are the only substances. However, he does think that bodies are the only substances we can think about using imagistic ideas.

Hobbes denies in Leviathan that we have an idea of God. He does think, though, that God exists, and does not even deny that we can think about God, even though he says we have no idea of God. There is, Hobbes thinks, another cognitive mechanism by means of which we can think about God. That mechanism allows us only to think a few things about God though. This constrains what Hobbes can say about our knowledge of God, and grounds (...) his belief in a fairly strong version of the thesis that God is incomprehensible. (shrink)

I consider Leibniz's thoughts about Hobbes's materialism, focusing on his less-discussed later thoughts about the topic. Leibniz understood Hobbes to have argued for his materialism from his imagistic theory of ideas. Leibniz offered several criticisms of this argument and the resulting materialism itself. Several of these criticisms occur in texts in which Leibniz was engaging with the generation of British philosophers after Hobbes. Of particular interest is Leibniz's correspondence with Damaris Masham. Leibniz may have been trying to communicate with Locke, (...) but ended up discussing Masham's version of the argument for materialism that Leibniz attributed to Hobbes. (shrink)

The ‘managed-metabolism’ hypothesis suggests that a ‘cooperation barrier’ must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to undergo the transition from non-life to life. This dynamical barrier prevents un-managed autocatalytic networks of molecular species from individuating into complex, cooperative organizations. The barrier arises because molecular species that could otherwise make significant cooperative contributions to the success of an organization will often not be supported within the organization, and because side reactions and other ‘free-riding’ processes will undermine cooperation. As a result, (...) the barrier seriously impedes the emergence of individuality, complex functionality and the transition to life. This barrier is analogous to the cooperation barrier that also impedes the emergence of complex cooperation at all levels of living organization. As has been shown at other levels of organization, the barrier can be overcome comprehensively by appropriate ‘management’. Management implements a system of evolvable constraints that can overcome the cooperation barrier by ensuring that beneficial co-operators are supported within the organization and by suppressing free-riders. In this way, management can control and manipulate the chemical processes of a collectively autocatalytic organization, producing novel processes that serve the interests of the organization as a whole and that could not arise and persist in an un-managed chemical organization. Management self-organizes because it is able to capture some of the benefits that are produced when its interventions promote cooperation, thereby enhancing productivity. Selection will therefore favour the emergence of managers that take over and manage chemical organizations so as to overcome the cooperation barrier. The managed-metabolism hypothesis demonstrates that if management is to overcome the cooperation barrier comprehensively, its interventions must be digitally coded. In this way, the hypothesis accounts for the two-tiered structure of all living cells in which a digitally-coded genetic apparatus manages an analogically-informed metabolism.GraphicalOpen image in new window. (shrink)

James Van Cleve raises some objections to my attempt to solve the bootstrapping problem for what I call “basic justification theories.” I argue that given 1 the inference rules endorsed by basic justification theorists, we are a priori (propositionally) justified in believing that perception is reliable. This blocks the bootstrapping result.

The notion of signification is an important part of Hobbes's philosophy of language. It also has broader relevance, as Hobbes argues that key terms used by his opponents are insignificant. However Hobbes's talk about names' signification is puzzling, as he appears to have advocated conflicting views. This paper argues that Hobbes endorsed two different views of names' signification in two different contexts. When stating his theoretical views about signification, Hobbes claimed that names signify ideas. Elsewhere he talked as if words (...) signified the things they named. Seeing this does not just resolve a puzzle about Hobbes's statements about signification. It also helps us to understand how Hobbes's arguments about insignificant speech work. With one important exception, they depend on the view that names signify things, not on Hobbes's stated theory that words signify ideas. The paper concludes by discussing whether arguments about insignificant speech can provide independent support for Hobbes's views about other issues, such as materialism. (shrink)

What is the potential for improvements in the functioning of consciousness? The paper addresses this issue using global workspace theory. According to this model, the prime function of consciousness is to develop novel adaptive responses. Consciousness does this by putting together new combinations of knowledge, skills and other disparate resources that are recruited from throughout the brain. The paper's search for potential improvements in consciousness is aided by studies of a developmental transition that enhances functioning in whichever domain it occurs. (...) This transition involves a shift from the use of procedural (implicit) knowledge to declarative (explicit) knowledge. However, the potential of the transition to enhance functioning has not yet been realised to any extent in relation to consciousness itself. The paper assesses the potential for consciousness to use declarative knowledge to improve its own functioning and to thereby enhance human adaptability. A number of sources (including the practices of religious and contemplative traditions) are drawn on to investigate how this potential might be realised. (shrink)

According to Charles Travis our language is occasion-sensitive. The truth- conditions of all our sentences, and their correctness-conditions more generally, vary depending on the occasions on which they are used. This is part of a broader view of language as unshadowed. This paper develops objections Travis has made from this viewpoint against Michael Dummett’s anti-realism. It aims to show that the arguments are suggestive but inconclusive. For all it shows unshadowed anti-realism is a possibility.

An aspect of Peirce’s thought that may still be underappreciated is his resistance to what Levi calls _pedigree epistemology_, to the idea that a central focus in epistemology should be the justification of current beliefs. Somewhat more widely appreciated is his rejection of the subjective view of probability. We argue that Peirce’s criticisms of subjectivism, to the extent they grant such a conception of probability is viable at all, revert back to pedigree epistemology. A thoroughgoing rejection of pedigree in the (...) context of probabilistic epistemology, however, _does_ challenge prominent subjectivist responses to the problem of the priors. (shrink)

Recent literature on the relationship between knowledge and justice has tended to focus exclusively on the social and ethical dimensions of this relationship (e.g. social injustices related to knowledge and power, etc.). For the purposes of this article, I am interested in examining the virtue of justice and its effects on the cognitive faculties of its possessor (and, correspondingly, the effects of the vice of injustice). Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of justice, I argue that in certain (...) cases justice can be a criterion of epistemic evaluation and that it deserves more attention than it has been given among virtue epistemologists. More precisely, the virtue of justice may become a criterion of epistemic evaluation in cases when a belief is formed on the basis of testimony. It would seem that there are cases when A’s assent to proposition p is something that is owed to B on the basis of B’s testimony; or there may be instances when A is culpable for declining to let B’s testimony have any effect on A’s belief. I briefly sketch four distinct scenarios in which this bears out. (shrink)

In his Target Article, Terrence Deacon develops simple models that assist in understanding the role of RNA in the origins of life. However, his models fail to adequately represent an important evolutionary dynamic. Central to this dynamic is the selection that impinges on RNA molecules in the context of their association with proto-metabolisms. This selection shapes the role of RNA in the emergence of life. When this evolutionary dynamic is appropriately taken into account, it predicts a role for RNA that (...) is consistent with the Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis about the origins of life, and inconsistent with Deacon’s account. (shrink)

Language was central to Hobbes's understanding of human beings and their mental abilities, and criticism of other philosophers' uses of language became a favorite critical tool for him. This paper connects Hobbes's theories about language to his criticisms of others' language, examining Hobbes's theories of propositions and truth, and how they relate to his claims that various sorts of proposition are absurd. It considers whether Hobbes in fact means anything more by 'absurd' than 'false'. And it pays particular attention to (...) Hobbes's categorization of causes of absurdity and of types of incoherent proposition, arguing that Hobbes's approach is only loosely related to later discussions of category mistakes. (shrink)

Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in a population is “completely (...) ignorant” about which utility functions belong to which individuals. Lerner models this ignorance with a certain uniform probability distribution, and shows that, under certain further assumptions, income should be equally distributed. Much of the criticism of the relevance of Lerner’s result centers on the representation of ignorance involved. Imprecise probabilities provide a general framework for reasoning about various forms of uncertainty including, in particular, ignorance. To what extent can Lerner’s conclusion be maintained in this setting? (shrink)