Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and the need for additional labor created by the default (...) skepticism of the privileged. I explore the connections between epistemic exploitation and the two varieties of epistemic injustice that Fricker (2007) identifies, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. I situate epistemic exploitation within Dotson’s (2012; 2014) framework of epistemic oppression, and I address the role that epistemic exploitation plays in maintaining active ignorance and upholding dominant epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to (...) understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color’s epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker’s whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism. (shrink)

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world. Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider whether scientific realism (...) is compatible with Humeanism about the laws of nature, and we conclude that it is not. We specifically identify three major problems for the best-systems account of lawhood: its central concept of strength cannot be formulated non-circularly, it cannot offer a satisfactory account of the laws of the special sciences, and it can offer no explanation of the success of inductive inference. In addition, Humeanism fails to be naturalistically motivated. For these reasons, we conclude that the scientific realist must embrace natural necessity. (shrink)

We argue that social deliberation may increase an agent’s confidence and credence under certain circumstances. An agent considers a proposition H and assigns a probability to it. However, she is not fully confident that she herself is reliable in this assignment. She then endorses H during deliberation with another person, expecting him to raise serious objections. To her surprise, however, the other person does not raise any objections to H. How should her attitudes toward H change? It seems plausible that (...) she should increase the credence she assigns to H and, at the same time, increase the reliability she assigns to herself concerning H. A Bayesian model helps us to investigate under what conditions, if any, this is rational. (shrink)

This paper argues that scientific realism commits us to a metaphysical determination relation between the mathematical entities that are indispensible to scientific explanation and the modal structure of the empirical phenomena those entities explain. The argument presupposes that scientific realism commits us to the indispensability argument. The viewpresented here is that the indispensability of mathematics commits us not only to the existence of mathematical structures and entities but to a metaphysical determination relation between those entities and the modal structure of (...) the physical world. The no-miracles argument is the primary motivation for scientific realism. It is a presupposition of this argument that unobservable entities are explanatory only when they determine the empirical phenomena they explain. I argue that mathematical entities should also be seen as explanatory only when they determine the empirical facts they explain, namely, the modal structure of the physical world. Thus, scientific realism commits us to a metaphysical determination relation between mathematics and physical modality that has not been previously recognized. The requirement to account for the metaphysical dependence of modal physical structure on mathematics limits the class of acceptable solutions to the applicability problem that are available to the scientific realist. (shrink)

Metacognitive mental states are mental states about mental states. For example, I may be uncertain whether my belief is correct. In social discourse, an interlocutor’s metacognitive certainty may constitute evidence about the reliability of their testimony. For example, if a speaker is certain that their belief is correct, then we may take this as evidence in favour of their belief, or its content. This paper argues that, if metacognitive certainty is genuine evidence, then it is disproportionate evidence for extreme beliefs. (...) In support of the argument, we report findings from five studies with different participant samples, designs, and measures. These studies show that, the more extreme an agent’s belief (positive or negative), the more certain they are about it, and vice versa. This relationship might contribute to moralism, virtue signalling, and polarisation, which in turn may be epistemically and morally problematic. Therefore, we caution against taking metacognitive certainty as genuine evidence. (shrink)

Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene’s argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontological ethics is a mere rationalization of these emotions. (...) Accordingly Greene maintains that deontology should be abandoned. This paper is a defense of deontological ethical theory. It argues that Greene’s argument against deontology needs further support. Greene’s empirical evidence is open to alternative interpretations. In particular, it is not clear that Greene’s characterization of alarm-like emotions that are relative to culture and personal experience is empirically tenable. Moreover, it is implausible that such emotions produce specifically deontological judgments. A rival sentimentalist view, according to which all moral judgments are determined by emotion, is at least as plausible given the empirical evidence and independently supported by philosophical theory. I therefore call for an improvement of Greene’s argument. (shrink)

Structures of oppression and administrative systems in white supremacist settler colonial societies rely on epistemological foundations to orient them toward their goals of containment and land dispossession. Structural gaslighting refers to the justifying stories and mythologies produced in these societies to normalize, obscure, and uphold structures of oppression. Such epistemic legwork often works by naturalizing socially produced inequalities through positing biological or cultural deficiencies in the target populations. This paper develops the concept of structural gaslighting introduced in Berenstain (2020) as (...) “any conceptual work that functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license” and explores its relationship to scientific and philosophical knowledge production. Case studies including historical and contemporary forms of scientific racism, philosophical justifications for ableist violence, and the link between disableization and dispossession for the purpose of settler colonial land theft are considered. (shrink)

Causal structuralism is the view that, for each natural, non-mathematical, non-Cambridge property, there is a causal profile that exhausts its individual essence. On this view, having a property’s causal profile is both necessary and sufficient for being that property. It is generally contrasted with the Humean or quidditistic view of properties, which states that having a property’s causal profile is neither necessary nor sufficient for being that property, and with the double-aspect view, which states that causal profile is necessary but (...) not sufficient. Shoemaker’s (1998) and Hawthorne’s (2001) arguments in favor of causal structuralism primarily focus on problematic consequences of the other two views. I argue, however, that causation does not provide an appropriate framework within which to characterize all physical properties for two main reasons. First, there are physical properties that do not have causal profiles and properties whose causal profiles do not exhaust their essences. Second, there is no unified notion of causation across the sciences. After distinguishing between the causal and the nomological, I suggest that what is needed is a structuralist view of properties that is not merely causal but that incorporates a physical property’s higher-order mathematical and nomological properties into its identity conditions. Such a view retains the naturalistic motivations for causal structuralism while avoiding the problems it faces. (shrink)

The so-called “conciliatory” norm in epistemology and meta-ethics requires that an agent, upon encountering peer disagreement with her judgment, lower her confidence about that judgment. But whether agents actually abide by this norm is unclear. Although confidence is excessively researched in the empirical sciences, possible effects of disagreement on confidence have been understudied. Here, we target this lacuna, reporting a study that measured confidence about moral beliefs before and after exposure to moral discourse about a controversial issue. Our findings indicate (...) that participants do not abide by the conciliatory norm. Neither do they conform to a rival “steadfast” norm that demands their confidence to remain the same. Instead, moral discourse seems to boost confidence. Interestingly, we also find a confidence boost for factual beliefs, and a correlation between the extremity of moral views and confidence. One possible explanation of our findings is that when engaging in moral discourse participants become more extreme in their opinions, which leads them to become more confident about them, or vice versa: they become more confident and in turn more extreme. Although our work provides initial evidence for the former mechanism, further research is needed for a better understanding of confidence and moral discourse. (shrink)

The underrepresentation of women, people of color, and especially women of color—and the corresponding overrepresentation of white men—is more pronounced in philosophy than in many of the sciences. I suggest that part of the explanation for this lies in the role played by the idealized rational self, a concept that is relatively influential in philosophy but rarely employed in the sciences. The idealized rational self models the mind as consistent, unified, rationally transcendent, and introspectively transparent. I hypothesize that acceptance of (...) the idealized rational self leads philosophers to underestimate the influence of implicit bias on their own judgments and prevents them from enacting the reforms necessary to minimize the effects of implicit bias on institutional decision-making procedures. I consider recent experiments in social psychology that suggest that an increased sense of one’s own objectivity leads to greater reliance on bias in hiring scenarios, and I hypothesize how these results might be applied to philosophers’ evaluative judgments. I discuss ways that the idealized rational self is susceptible to broader critiques of ideal theory, and I consider some of the ways that the picture functions as a tool of active ignorance and color-evasive racism. (shrink)

Privileged-perspective realism (PPR) is a version of metaphysical realism that takes certain irreducibly perspectival facts to be partly constitutive of reality. PPR asserts that there is a single metaphysically privileged standpoint from which these perspectival facts obtain. This chapter discusses several views that fall under the category of privileged-perspective realism. These include presentism, which is PPR about tensed facts, and non-multiverse interpretations of quantum mechanics, which the chapter argues, constitute PPR about world-indexed facts. Using the framework of the bird perspective (...) and the frog perspective, it argues that PPR views methodologically treat the frog perspective as metaphysically primary. This chapter considers case studies of metaphysical interpretations of special relativity and quantum mechanics in order to demonstrate that such motivations for PPR are non-naturalistic. Further, it considers psychological factors that motivate the appeal of PPR views and offers naturalistic explanations of why we should not expect them to produce an adequate metaphysics of science. (shrink)

MARGARET LYNN SCHABAS (Toronto, 1954) is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and served as the head of the Philosophy Department from 2004-2009. She has held professoriate positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at York University, and has also taught as a visiting professor at Michigan State University, University of Colorado-Boulder, Harvard, CalTech, the Sorbonne, and the École Normale de Cachan. As the recipient of several fellowships, she has enjoyed visiting terms at Stanford, (...) Duke, MIT, Cambridge, the LSE, and the MPI-Berlin. In addition to her doctorate in the history and philosophy of science and technology (Toronto 1983), she holds a bachelor of science in music (oboe) and the philosophy of science (Indiana 1976), a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science (Indiana 1977), and a master’s degree in economics (Michigan1985). -/- She has published four books and over forty articles or book chapters in science studies. Some of the journals in which her articles can be found are Isis, Monist, History of Political Economy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Daedaelus, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her first book, A world ruled by number (1990) examines the emergence of mathematical economics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her second book, The natural origins of economics (2005), traces the transformation of economics from a natural to a social science. She also has two co-edited collections, Oeconomies in the age of Newton (2003), with Neil De Marchi, and David Hume’s political economy (2008), with Carl Wennerlind. She is currently writing a monograph on Hume’s economics, as well as articles on the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. She is currently president of the History of Economics Society. -/- EJPE interviewed Margaret Schabas at the University of British Columbia in March 2013. In this interview, she recounts her earliest foray into the history and philosophy of economics, the conceptual trade between economics and natural science, and her most recent undertaking: the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. (shrink)

Đôi khi hình thái “chiến lợi phẩm” từ thiên nhiên chỉ rất đơn giản thế này thôi. Hai cán bộ nghiên cứu lượm được gì? Một chùm “hạt dẻ” không gai (hạt bên trong trông tuyệt đối giống hạt dẻ, cũng có vỏ cứng, nhưng không có lớp áo gai như lông nhím bao ngoài). Một cành cây sa nhân khá lớn, kích thước có lẽ trưởng thành, cực đại. Một chú ốc núi, đang bám vào lá sa nhân để (...) đánh chén bữa trưa. (shrink)

Philosophers have predominantly regarded morality and aesthetics judgments as fundamentally different. However, whether this claim is empirically founded has remained unclear. In a novel task, we measured brain activity of participants judging the aesthetic beauty of artwork or the moral goodness of actions depicted. To control for the content of judgments, participants assessed the age of the artworks and the speed of depicted actions. Univariate analyses revealed whole-brain corrected, content-controlled common activation for aesthetics and morality judgments in frontopolar, dorsomedial and (...) ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Temporoparietal cortex showed activation specific for morality judgments, occipital cortex for aesthetics judgments. Multivariate analyses revealed both common and distinct whole-brain corrected representations for morality and aesthetics judgments in temporoparietal and prefrontal regions. Overall, neural commonalities are more pronounced than predominant philosophical views would predict. They are compatible with minority accounts that stress commonalities between aesthetics and morality judgments, such as sentimentalism and a valuation framework. (shrink)

New theological understanding can emerge with the advancement of scientific knowledge and the use of new concepts, or older concepts in new ways. Here, the authors present a proposal to extend the concept of “rescue and recovery” found in the United Nations Law of the High Seas, off‐world and within a broader purview of other intelligent and self‐aware species that humans may someday encounter. The notion of a morality that extends to off‐world species is not new, but in this analysis, (...) rescue and recovery become an imperative when any intelligent and self‐aware species is in harm's way. Rescue and recovery encompass a necessary action component except perhaps in those cases where rescuers are in danger. The authors explore three biblical examples of rescue and recovery to derive a fundamental meaning of the concept. (shrink)

This paper shows that our popular account of weakness of will is inconsistent with dilemmas. In dilemmas, agents judge that they ought to do one thing, that they ought to do something else, and that they cannot do both. They must act against either of their two judgments. But such action is commonly understood as weakness of will. An agent is weak-willed in doing something if she judges that she ought to and could do something else instead. Thus, it seems (...) that, in a dilemma, the agent is weak-willed by definition. But this is puzzling: clearly, the two are different phenomena. The puzzle may support scepticism about weakness of will or dilemmas. Here, I argue that the two are consistent on a revised understanding of weakness of will. To do so, I further distinguish the mental states of an agent in a dilemma from those of a weak-willed person. (shrink)

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of (...) embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment. (shrink)

Calls for civility have been on the rise recently, as have presumptions that civility is both an academic virtue and a prerequisite for rational engagement and discussion among those who disagree. One imperative of epistemic decolonization is to unmask the ways that familiar conceptual resources are produced within and function to uphold a settler colonial epistemological framework. I argue that rhetorical deployments of ‘civility’ uphold settler colonialism by obscuring the systematic production of state violence against marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples, (...) relying on the colonial conceptual framework of ‘civilized’ vs ‘savage’, and excusing death-promoting rhetoric under the guise of liberal disagreement. (shrink)

In some vicarious cases of compensation, an agent seems obligated to compensate for a harm they did not inflict. This raises the problem that obligations for compensation may arise out of circumstantial luck. That is, an agent may owe compensation for a harm that was outside their control. Addressing this issue, I identify five conditions for compensation from the literature: causal engagement, proxy, ill-gotten gains, constitution, and affiliation. I argue that only two of them specify genuine and irreducible grounds for (...) compensation, and that factors determining the agent’s obligations may be beyond their control. However, I suggest that this is unproblematic. There is thus no problem of circumstantial moral luck for compensation. (shrink)

Cis moves to innocence are rhetorical moves by which cisgender feminists falsely position their failure to engage with structures of transmisogyny as epistemically and morally virtuous. The notion derives from Tuck and Yang’s (2012) concept of settler moves to innocence and Mawhinney’s (1998) concept of white moves to innocence. This piece considers the case study of Manne’s (2017) work, in which she purports to offer a unified account of misogyny while explicitly refusing to consider transmisogyny. The justification she provides is (...) that she lacks the “requisite authority to do so.” I identify three functions of Manne’s cis move to innocence: i) to allow her to appear to be in solidarity with trans women and transfeminine people without taking on any of the obligations that requires, ii) to structurally reproduce the epistemic exploitation of trans women and transfeminine people, and iii) to reduce the obligations of allies to affect rather than action. (shrink)

Contingentism, generally contrasted with law necessitarianism, is the view that the laws of nature are contingent. It is often coupled with the claim that their contingency is knowable a priori. This paper considers Bird's (2001, 2002, 2005, 2007) arguments for the thesis that, necessarily, salt dissolves in water; and it defends his view against Beebee's (2001) and Psillos's (2002) contingentist objections. A new contingentist objection is offered and several reasons for scepticism about its success are raised. It is concluded that (...) certain higher-level laws describing the behaviours of molecular compounds may be necessary due to their dependence on underlying physical laws, and that the modal status of laws of nature cannot be determined a priori, as the structural features of the substances and properties they govern must first be investigated. (shrink)

According to a popular account, rationality is a kind of coherence of an agent’s mental states and, more specifically, a matter of fulfilling norms of coherence. For example, in order to be rational, an agent is required to intend to do what they judge they ought to and can do. This norm has been called ‘Enkrasia’. Another norm requires that, ceteris paribus, an agent retain their intention over time. This has been called ‘Persistence of Intention’. This paper argues that thus (...) understood norms of rationality may at times conflict. More specifically, Enkrasia and Persistence of Intention may place demands on the agent that are impossible to fulfil. In these cases, the framework of requirements does not provide us with norms that make us rational. A rival account, according to which rationality is a kind of responsiveness to one’s available reasons, can overcome the problem. (shrink)

Recent epidemiological reports of associations between socioeconomic status and epigenetic markers that predict vulnerability to diseases are bringing to light substantial biological effects of social inequalities. Here, we start the discussion of the moral consequences of these findings. We firstly highlight their explanatory importance in the context of the research program on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and the social determinants of health. In the second section, we review some theories of the moral status of health inequalities. (...) Rather than a complete outline of the debate, we single out those theories that rest on the principle of equality of opportunity and analyze the consequences of DOHaD and epigenetics for these particular conceptions of justice. We argue that DOHaD and epigenetics reshape the conceptual distinction between natural and acquired traits on which these theories rely and might provide important policy tools to tackle unjust distributions of health. (shrink)

This analysis summarizes conclusions on an evolutionary model for the origin of moral and religious capacities in the genus Homo. The authors’ published model (2020, Routledge) is now extended to the emergence of nascent theological thinking, augmenting the previous line of theory based on genomics, cognitive science, neuroscience, paleoneurology, cognitive archaeology, ethnography, and modern social science. This analysis concludes that findings support the earliest theological thinking in Homo sapiens, but not in an earlier species, Homo erectus, and clarifies why and (...) when it likely began. Types of anatomy, behavior, neurology, and cognition are presented that support tendencies to frame a structure of religious principles and a set of supernatural figures that early humans would consider right, just, exemplary, and even sacred. Stages of emergent physical, behavioral, and cognitive features are presented in tables. While based on published research results in the sciences, the model is presented here with anticipation of future testing. (shrink)

This paper raises two problems for plan-expressivism concerning normative judgments about non-corealizable actions: actions which cannot both be performed. First, plan-expressivists associate normative judgment with an attitude which satisfies a corealizability constraint, but this constraint is (in the interpersonal case) unwarranted, and (in the intrapersonal case) warranted only at the price of a contentious normative premise. Ayars (2022) holds that the pair of judgments ‘A should φ’ and ‘B should ψ’ is coherent only if one believes that A can φ (...) while B ψ’s. But this is false. Both Gibbard (2003) and Ayars hold that the pair of judgments ‘A should φ’ and ‘A should ψ’ is coherent only if one believes that A can φ and ψ. But this assumes possibilism. Second, the paper demonstrates, cases involving interpersonal non-corealizability prompt judgments about what multiple agents should do which – contra Gibbard – are not plausibly associated with any planning subject. (shrink)

This paper considers the practical question of why people do not behave in the way they ought to behave. This question is a practical one, reaching both into the normative and descriptive domains of morality. That is, it concerns moral norms as well as empirical facts. We argue that two main problems usually keep us form acting and judging in a morally decent way: firstly, we make mistakes in moral reasoning. Secondly, even when we know how to act and judge, (...) we still fail to meet the requirements due to personal weaknesses. This discussion naturally leads us to another question: can we narrow the gap between what people are morally required to do and what they actually do? We discuss findings from neuroscience, economics, and psychology, considering how we might bring our moral behavior better in line with moral theory. Potentially fruitful means include nudging, training, pharmacological enhancement, and brain stimulation. We conclude by raising the question of whether such methods could and should be implemented. (shrink)

We provide a novel defense of the possibility of level-splitting beliefs and use this defense to show that the steadfast response to peer disagreement is not, as it is often claimed to be, unnecessarily dogmatic. To provide this defense, a neglected form of moral disagreement is analysed. Within the context of this particular kind of moral disagreement, a similarly neglected form of level-splitting belief is identified and then defended from critics of the rationality of level-splitting beliefs. The chapter concludes by (...) showing that proponents of the steadfast response to peer disagreement can adopt this form of level-splitting belief in the context of these moral disagreements while exemplifying intellectual humility, rather than dogmatism. (shrink)

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...) substantive views about justice in outcome distributions. (shrink)

Vulnerability is a notion discussed in feminist philosophy as a basis for a morality that widens our sense of those whose deaths are grievable. Vulnerability and grievability also factor in reproductive ethics. This essay employs recognition theory to analyze critically how these notions are mobilized in conservative Christian anti-abortion writings and in feminist philosophy. This analysis exposes weaknesses and misrecognition in both sets of discourses. In response, I offer theological arguments for recognizing fetal value without implying a right to life (...) and for acknowledging how human finitude and the precarity of pregnancy render gestational hospitality a discretionary, not obligatory, moral act. (shrink)

Bedau's influential (1997) account analyzes weak emergence in terms of the non-derivability of a system’s macrostates from its microstates except by simulation. I offer an improved version of Bedau’s account of weak emergence in light of insights from information theory. Non-derivability alone does not guarantee that a system’s macrostates are weakly emergent. Rather, it is non-derivability plus the algorithmic compressibility of the system’s macrostates that makes them weakly emergent. I argue that the resulting information-theoretic picture provides a metaphysical account of (...) weak emergence rather than a merely epistemic one. (shrink)

ENGLISH. From statements about what is the case we cannot derive statements about what ought to be. This is only one way in which we can describe the dichotomy between Is and Ought that has preoccupied philosophers since Hume to the present day. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the question of whether statements about what ought to be may commit us to, or even imply, statements about what is. This paper aims to address this shortcoming. It pursues (...) two goals. First, it tries to show that rationality requires empirical evidence about what is if we have normative beliefs about what we ought to do. Second, it tries to draw two further conclusions for (academic) philosophers. On the one hand, in our research on normative statements, we are rationally required to consider relevant empirical findings. On the other hand, as individuals we are rationally required to intend to act in accordance with our normative beliefs. -/- DEUTSCH. Aus Aussagen darüber, was der Fall ist, lassen sich keine Aussagen darüber ableiten, was sein sollte. Dies ist nur eine Beschreibung der Dichotomie von Sein und Sollen, die Philosophen seit Hume bis heute beschäftigt. Umgekehrt hat die Frage relativ wenig Beachtung gefunden, ob Aussagen darüber, was sein sollte, zu Aussagen darüber, was ist, führen können oder sie gar implizieren. Der vorliegende Beitrag möchte diesem Manko entgegentreten. Er verfolgt zwei Ziele: Erstens versucht er im Allgemeinen zu zeigen, dass normative Überzeugungen darüber, was man tun sollte, unter rationalem Gesichtspunkt empirischer Evidenz bedürfen. Zweitens versucht er, spezifisch für uns (akademisch) Philosophierende zwei weitere Folgerungen zu ziehen. Einerseits sind wir in unserer Forschung über normative Aussagen rational verpflichtet, relevante empirische Befunde zu beachten. Andererseits sind wir als Individuen rational verpflichtet zu beabsichtigen, selbst unseren normativen Überzeugungen entsprechend zu handeln. (shrink)

There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...) that cannot be disentangled from the goals of ongoing settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. While white feminist narratives of gender-based administrative violence in Latin America function to distance the places where such violence occurs from the ‘liberal democratic’ settler nation-states of the U.S. and Canada, we hold that administrative forms of reproductive violence against Latin American women are structurally connected to efforts in the U.S. and Canada to criminalize women of color and Indigenous women for their reproductive outcomes. The purpose of these systemically produced harms is to sustain cultures of gender-based violence in support of settler colonial configurations of power. (shrink)

This paper argues for a methodological point that bears on a relatively long-standing debate concerning collective beliefs in the sense elaborated by Margaret Gilbert: are they cases of belief or rather of acceptance? It is argued that epistemological accounts and distinctions developed in individual epistemology on the basis of considering the individual case are not necessarily applicable to the collective case or, more generally, uncritically to be adopted in collective epistemology.

Holm (2022) argues that a class of algorithmic fairness measures, that he refers to as the ‘performance parity criteria’, can be understood as applications of John Broome’s Fairness Principle. We argue that the performance parity criteria cannot be read this way. This is because in the relevant context, the Fairness Principle requires the equalization of actual individuals’ individual-level chances of obtaining some good (such as an accurate prediction from a predictive system), but the performance parity criteria do not guarantee any (...) such thing: the measures merely ensure that certain population-level ratios hold. (shrink)

This chapter includes Margaret Floy Washburn’s discussion of the basis of inferences about animal minds and her discussion of what it is like to be an amoeba.

Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny combines traditional conceptual analysis and feminist conceptual engineering with critical exploration of cases drawn from popular culture and current events in order to produce an ameliorative account of misogyny, i.e., one that will help address the problems of misogyny in the actual world. A feminist account of misogyny that is both intersectional and ameliorative must provide theoretical tools for recognizing misogyny in its many-dimensional forms, as it interacts and overlaps with other oppressions. (...) While Manne thinks subtly about many of the material conditions that create misogyny as a set of normative social practices, she does not fully extend this care to the other intersectional forms of oppression she discusses. After touching on the book’s strengths, I track variations of its main problem, namely, its failure to fully conceive of oppressions besides sexism and misogyny as systemic patterns of social practices, as inherently structural rather than mere collections of individual beliefs and behaviors. (shrink)

The cucumber is a creeping vine that roots in the ground and grows up trellises or other supporting frames, wrapping around supports with thin, spiraling tendrils. The plant may also root in a soilless medium, whereby it will sprawl along the ground in lieu of a supporting structure. The vine has large leaves that form a canopy over the fruits. Among these common diseases, we single out the diseases that affect the cucumber, which is affected by about 22 diseases, with (...) different symptoms for each disease. Today, technology is facilitating human life in all areas of life, and among these facilities are expert systems that have become an integral part of human life as they contain several systems and areas, for example: Artificial Intelligence (AI), which refers to systems or devices that simulate Human intelligence to perform tasks that can improve itself based on some human information, and other areas, and with reference to expert systems and their importance to humans, an integrated expert system has been created in the agricultural field that diagnoses cucumber diseases using CLIPS Expert System language Delphi language. The system was used to design and implement the proposed expert system. The system facilitates the diagnosis of cucumber-related diseases. There is no doubt that this expert system will help farmers and those involved in the agricultural field to diagnose cucumber-related diseases. Objectives: is to help farmers diagnose pear diseases in the correct way and how to treat these diseases. Method: The system contains a program that diagnoses 22 diseases that affect cucumber. Results: The expert system was evaluated by farmers and praised for helping them with it. Conclusion: The expert system for diagnosing cucumber diseases is effective and usable. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a distinctive vice of hypocrisy, which is Janus-faced. The vice of hypocrisy is the self-excepting avoidance of a particular pain, namely, the pain associated with being an object of blame one believes deserved. One can self-exceptingly avoid this pain attitudinally or behaviorally. With “attitudinal” hypocrisy, a person avoids it at the level of her beliefs: she avoids forming the belief that she is blameworthy for some act, while blaming others for their comparable acts. With (...) “behavioral” hypocrisy, by contrast, a person avoids it at the level of her behavior. She shields herself from the blame she believes her acts merit (e.g. by hiding what she has done), while blaming others for their comparable acts. The paper argues that both forms of hypocrisy are objectionable and explains how they are in tension, such that a given instance of the vice will typically involve only one or the other. Though both attitudinal and behavioral hypocrisy selectively spare the hypocrite the same pain, they require incongruous moral-psychological states: the attitudinal hypocrite avoids blaming herself, while the behavioral hypocrite proceeds on the assumption she is blameworthy. (shrink)

In discussions of religious disagreement, some epistemologists have suggested that religious disagreement is distinctive. More specifically, they have argued that religious disagreement has certain features which make it possible for theists to resist conciliatory arguments that they must adjust their religious beliefs in response to finding that peers disagree with them. I consider what I take to be the two most prominent features which are claimed to make religious disagreement distinct: religious evidence and evaluative standards in religious contexts. I argue (...) that these two features fail to distinguish religious disagreement in the ways they have been taken to. However, I show that the view that religious disagreement is not a unique form of disagreement makes religious disagreement less, rather than more, worrisome to the theist who would prefer to rationally remain steadfast in her religious beliefs. (shrink)

Typical agreements can be seen as joint decisions, inherently involving obligations of a distinctive kind. These obligations derive from the joint commitment' that underlies a joint decision. One consequence of this understanding of agreements and their obligations is that coerced agreements are possible and impose obligations. It is not that the parties to an agreement should always conform to it, all things considered. Unless one is released from the agreement, however, one has some reason to conform to it, whatever else (...) is true. In this sense, one is under an obligation to the other parties. The relevance of these points to the issue of political obligation is discussed. (shrink)

Among other things, this paper considers what so-called collective guilt feelings amount to. If collective guilt feelings are sometimes appropriate, it must be the case that collectives can indeed be guilty. The paper begins with an account of what it is for a collective to intend to do something and to act in light of that intention. An account of collective guilt in terms of membership guilt feelings is found wanting. Finally, a "plural subject" account of collective guilt feelings is (...) articulated, such that they involve a joint commitment to feel guilt as a body. (shrink)

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations of (...) non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

Collective action is interpreted as a matter of people doing something together, and it is assumed that this involves their having a collective intention to do that thing together. The account of collective intention for which the author has argued elsewhere is presented. In terms that are explained, the parties are jointly committed to intend as a body that such-and-such. Collective action problems in the sense of rational choice theory—problems such as the various forms of coordination problem and the prisoner’s (...) dilemma—are then considered. An explanation is given of how, when such a problem is interpreted in terms of the parties’ inclinations, a suitable collective intention resolves the problem for agents who are rational in a broad sense other than the technical sense of game theory. Key Words: rationality • collective action • collective intention • joint commitment. (shrink)

The goal of this pilot study is to investigate expressions of the collective disquiet of people in the first months of Covid-19 pandemic, and to try to understand how they manage covert risk, especially with religion and magic. Four co-authors living in early hot spots of the pandemic speculate on the roles of science, religion, and magic, in the latest global catastrophe. They delve into the consolidation that should be occurring worldwide because of a common, viral enemy, but find little (...) evidence for it. They draw parallels to biblical works, finding evidence of a connection between plague and “social strife.” They explore changes in the purviews of science, religion, and magic, and how and why they have changed, as three systems of covert risk management. They speculate on the coming wave of grief when the world populations finally decide that too many people have died, and they envision cultural changes on the other side of the pandemic, to lifestyles, travel, reverse urbanization, and living and working in smaller communities. Using an unusual approach named “crowd-sourced ethnography”, they conduct un-traditional ethnography and speculate on management of covert risk in their native countries. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)