Results for 'Marc Lange'

408 found
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  1. The Necessity of Accidents.Chris Dorst & Marc Lange - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    We argue that if there are laws of nature, then there must also be accidents. If the “laws” in a world suffice to determine the world’s entire history, then these “laws” cannot play various central roles characteristic of laws, and thus (we conclude) they are not laws at all. Many proposed accounts of lawhood (primitivist accounts, universals accounts, the Best System Account, the Package Deal Account, essentialist accounts) inappropriately permit worlds with laws but no accidents. We identify two otherwise dissimilar (...)
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  2. (2 other versions)Running up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes: A response to Woodward on causal and explanatory asymmetries.Katrina Elliott & Marc Lange - forthcoming - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science.
    Does smoke cause fire or does fire cause smoke? James Woodward’s “Flagpoles anyone? Causal and explanatory asymmetries” argues that various statistical independence relations not only help us to uncover the directions of causal and explanatory relations in our world, but also are the worldly basis of causal and explanatory directions. We raise questions about Woodward’s envisioned epistemology, but our primary focus is on his metaphysics. We argue that any alleged connection between statistical (in)dependence and causal/explanatory direction is contingent, at best. (...)
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  3. Lange on essentialism, counterfactuals, and explanation.Toby Handfield - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (1):81 – 85.
    Marc Lange objects to scientific essentialists that they can give no better account of the counterfactual invariance of laws than Humeans. While conceding this point succeeds ad hominem against some essentialists, I show that it does not undermine essentialism in general. Moreover, Lange's alternative account of the relation between laws and counterfactuals is - with minor modification - compatible with essentialism.
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  4. Lange on Minimal Model Explanations: A Defense of Batterman and Rice.Travis McKenna - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (4):731-741.
    Marc Lange has recently raised three objections to the account of minimal model explanations offered by Robert Batterman and Collin Rice. In this article, I suggest that these objections are misguided. I suggest that the objections raised by Lange stem from a misunderstanding of the what it is that minimal model explanations seek to explain. This misunderstanding, I argue, consists in Lange’s seeing minimal model explanations as relating special types of models to particular target systems rather (...)
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  5. Necessities Overboard: A Reply to Lange.Harjit Bhogal - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    In this discussion note I reply to some criticisms that Marc Lange (2022) has directed at my Humean view of scientific laws (Bhogal, 2020) -- about whether Humean views can make sense of the apparent fact that laws are counterfactually invariant. The key idea of my response is that the Humean should think of their reduction of the laws to the Humean mosaic as closely related to other views where we reduce one domain to another but still allow (...)
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  6. Are mathematical explanations causal explanations in disguise?A. Jha, Douglas Campbell, Clemency Montelle & Phillip L. Wilson - 2024 - Philosophy of Science (NA):1-19.
    There is a major debate as to whether there are non-causal mathematical explanations of physical facts that show how the facts under question arise from a degree of mathematical necessity considered stronger than that of contingent causal laws. We focus on Marc Lange’s account of distinctively mathematical explanations to argue that purported mathematical explanations are essentially causal explanations in disguise and are no different from ordinary applications of mathematics. This is because these explanations work not by appealing to (...)
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  7. Humean scientific explanation.Elizabeth Miller - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (5):1311-1332.
    In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking scientific (...)
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  8. An Intuitive Solution to the Problem of Induction.Andrew Bassford - 2022 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 26 (2):205-232.
    The subject of this essay is the classical problem of induction, which is sometimes attributed to David Hume and called “the Humean Problem of Induction.” Here, I examine a certain sort of Neo-Aristotelian solution to the problem, which appeals to the concept of natural kinds in its response to the inductive skeptic. This position is most notably represented by Howard Sankey and Marc Lange. The purpose of this paper is partly destructive and partly constructive. I raise two questions. (...)
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  9. If You're Quasi-Explaining, You're Quasi-Losing.Derek Baker - 2021 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 16. Oxford University Press.
    Normative discourse frequently involves explanation. For example, we tell children that hitting is wrong because it hurts people. In a recent paper, Selim Berker argues that to account for this kind of explanation, expressivists need an account of normative grounding. Against this, I argue that expressivists should eschew grounding and stick to a more pragmatic picture of explanation, one that focuses on how we use explanatory speech acts to communicate information. I propose that the standard form of a normative explanation (...)
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  10. Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds.Matthew H. Slater & Chris Haufe - 2009 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (3):265-276.
    Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology (...)
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    Addressing implicit bias: A theoretical model for promoting integrative reflective practice in live-client law clinics.Marc Johnson & Omar Madhloom - 2024 - European Journal of Legal Education 5 (1):55-87.
    Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to technical (...)
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    Les invisibles et les inaudibles de l'ingénierie.Marc-Kevin Daoust - manuscript
    Une des contributions phares de Luc Bégin à l’éthique publique est d’avoir bien documenté les obstacles auxquels les gardiens institutionnels québécois doivent porter une attention particulière. Bégin s’est notamment intéressé aux conditions dans lesquelles les ordres professionnels, comme l’Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, sont moins susceptibles de protéger le public contre des pratiques répréhensibles (corruption, collusion, etc.). Je poursuis les réflexions de Bégin à partir d’un point de vue « épistémique ». Je montre d’abord comment les ordres professionnels ont tendance (...)
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  13. Strong liberal representationalism.Marc Artiga - 2022 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (3):645-667.
    The received view holds that there is a significant divide between full-blown representational states and so called ‘detectors’, which are mechanisms set off by specific stimuli that trigger a particular effect. The main goal of this paper is to defend the idea that many detectors are genuine representations, a view that I call ‘Strong Liberal Representationalism’. More precisely, I argue that ascribing semantic properties to them contributes to an explanation of behavior, guides research in useful ways and can accommodate misrepresentation.
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  14. The Ethics of Partiality.Benjamin Lange - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 1 (8):1-15.
    Partiality is the special concern that we display for ourselves and other people with whom we stand in some special personal relationship. It is a central theme in moral philosophy, both ancient and modern. Questions about the justification of partiality arise in the context of enquiry into several moral topics, including the good life and the role in it of our personal commitments; the demands of impartial morality, equality, and other moral ideals; and commonsense ideas about supererogation. This paper provides (...)
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  15. Rescuing tracking theories of morality.Marc Artiga - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (12):3357-3374.
    Street’s (Philos Stud 127(1):109–166, 2006) Darwinian Dilemma purports to show that evolutionary considerations are in tension with realist theories of value, which include moral realism. According to this argument, moral realism can only be defended by assuming an implausible tracking relation between moral attitudes and moral facts. In this essay, I argue that this tracking relation is not as implausible as most people have assumed by showing that the three main objections against it are flawed. Since this is a key (...)
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  16. Decide As You Would With Full Information! An Argument Against Ex Ante Pareto.Marc Fleurbaey & Alex Voorhoeve - 2013 - In Nir Eyal, Samia A. Hurst, Ole F. Norheim & Dan Wikler (eds.), Inequalities in Health: Concepts, Measures, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.
    Policy-makers must sometimes choose between an alternative which has somewhat lower expected value for each person, but which will substantially improve the outcomes of the worst off, or an alternative which has somewhat higher expected value for each person, but which will leave those who end up worst off substantially less well off. The popular ex ante Pareto principle requires the choice of the alternative with higher expected utility for each. We argue that ex ante Pareto ought to be rejected (...)
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  17. Equality of resources revisited.Marc Fleurbaey - 2002 - Ethics 113 (1):82-105.
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  18. Re-organizing organizational accounts of function.Marc Artiga - 2011 - Applied ontology 6 (2):105-124.
    In this paper I discuss a recent theory on functions called Organizational Account. This theory seeks to provide a new definition of function that overcomes the distinction between etiological and dispositional accounts and that could be used in biology as well as in technology. I present a definition of function that I think captures the intuitions of Organizational Accounts and consider several objections.
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  19. Moral Parenthood: Not Gestational.Benjamin Lange - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    Parenting our biological children is a centrally important matter, but how, if it all, can it be justified? According to a contemporary influential line of thinking, the acquisition by parents of a moral right to parent their biological children should be grounded by appeal to the value of the intimate emotional relationship that gestation facilitates between a newborn and a gestational procreator. I evaluate two arguments in defence of this proposal and argue that both are unconvincing.
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  20. A Framework for Assurance Audits of Algorithmic Systems.Benjamin Lange, Khoa Lam, Borhane Hamelin, Davidovic Jovana, Shea Brown & Ali Hasan - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 2024 Acm Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
    An increasing number of regulations propose the notion of ‘AI audits’ as an enforcement mechanism for achieving transparency and accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite some converging norms around various forms of AI auditing, auditing for the purpose of compliance and assurance currently have little to no agreed upon practices, procedures, taxonomies, and standards. We propose the ‘criterion audit’ as an operationalizable compliance and assurance external audit framework. We model elements of this approach after financial auditing practices, and argue (...)
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  21. Teleosemantic modeling of cognitive representations.Marc Artiga - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (4):483-505.
    Naturalistic theories of representation seek to specify the conditions that must be met for an entity to represent another entity. Although these approaches have been relatively successful in certain areas, such as communication theory or genetics, many doubt that they can be employed to naturalize complex cognitive representations. In this essay I identify some of the difficulties for developing a teleosemantic theory of cognitive representations and provide a strategy for accommodating them: to look into models of signaling in evolutionary game (...)
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  22. (1 other version)On the possibility of nonaggregative priority for the worst off.Marc Fleurbaey, Bertil Tungodden & Peter Vallentyne - 2009 - Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (1):258-285.
    We shall focus on moral theories that are solely concerned with promoting the benefits (e.g., wellbeing) of individuals and explore the possibility of such theories ascribing some priority to benefits to those who are worse off—without this priority being absolute. Utilitarianism (which evaluates alternatives on the basis of total or average benefits) ascribes no priority to the worse off, and leximin (which evaluates alternatives by giving lexical priority to the worst off, and then the second worst off, and so on) (...)
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  23. Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: How Peircean Semiotics Combines Phenomenal Qualia and Practical Effects.Marc Champagne - 2018 - Cham: Springer.
    It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period (...)
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  24. Structural Rationality and the Property of Coherence.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (1):170-194.
    What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...)
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  25. Imperfection, Accuracy, and Structural Rationality.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1095-1116.
    Structural requirements of rationality prohibit various things, like having inconsistent combinations of attitudes, having means-end incoherent combinations of attitudes, and so on. But what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? And do we fall under an obligation to be structurally rational? These issues have been at the heart of significant debates over the past fifteen years. Some philosophers have recently argued that we can unify the structural requirements of rationality by analyzing what is constitutive of our attitudes (...)
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  26. In Defense of Batman: Reply to Bradley.Gerald Lang & Rob Lawlor - 2013 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (3):1-7.
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  27. Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling.Marc D. Lewis - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2):169-194.
    Efforts to bridge emotion theory with neurobiology can be facilitated by dynamic systems (DS) modeling. DS principles stipulate higher-order wholes emerging from lower-order constituents through bidirectional causal processes cognition relations. I then present a psychological model based on this reconceptualization, identifying trigger, self-amplification, and self-stabilization phases of emotion-appraisal states, leading to consolidating traits. The article goes on to describe neural structures and functions involved in appraisal and emotion, as well as DS mechanisms of integration by which they interact. These mechanisms (...)
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  28. Other‐Sacrificing Options.Benjamin Lange - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3):612-629.
    I argue that you can be permitted to discount the interests of your adversaries even though doing so would be impartially suboptimal. This means that, in addition to the kinds of moral options that the literature traditionally recognises, there exist what I call other-sacrificing options. I explore the idea that you cannot discount the interests of your adversaries as much as you can favour the interests of your intimates; if this is correct, then there is an asymmetry between negative partiality (...)
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  29. My Life Gives the Moral Landscape its Relief.Marc Champagne - 2023 - In Sandra Woien (ed.), Sam Harris: Critical Responses. Chicago: Carus Books. pp. 17–38.
    Sam Harris (2010) argues that, given our neurology, we can experience well-being, and that seeking to maximize this state lets us distinguish the good from the bad. He takes our ability to compare degrees of well-being as his starting point, but I think that the analysis can be pushed further, since there is a (non-religious) reason why well-being is desirable, namely the finite life of an individual organism. It is because death is a constant possibility that things can be assessed (...)
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  30. Animals and the agency account of moral status.Marc G. Wilcox - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1879-1899.
    In this paper, I aim to show that agency-based accounts of moral status are more plausible than many have previously thought. I do this by developing a novel account of moral status that takes agency, understood as the capacity for intentional action, to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the possession of moral status. This account also suggests that the capacities required for sentience entail the possession of agency, and the capacities required for agency, entail the possession of sentience. (...)
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  31. Beyond black dots and nutritious things: A solution to the indeterminacy problem.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (3):471-490.
    The indeterminacy problem is one of the most prominent objections against naturalistic theories of content. In this essay I present this difficulty and argue that extant accounts are unable to solve it. Then, I develop a particular version of teleosemantics, which I call ’explanation-based teleosemantics’, and show how this outstanding problem can be addressed within the framework of a powerful naturalistic theory.
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  32. Restricted Prioritarianism or Competing Claims?Benjamin Lange - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (2):137-152.
    I here settle a recent dispute between two rival theories in distributive ethics: Restricted Prioritarianism and the Competing Claims View. Both views mandate that the distribution of benefits and burdens between individuals should be justifiable to each affected party in a way that depends on the strength of each individual’s separately assessed claim to receive a benefit. However, they disagree about what elements constitute the strength of those individuals’ claims. According to restricted prioritarianism, the strength of a claim is determined (...)
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  33. The comparison problem for approximating epistemic ideals.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2023 - Ratio 36 (1):22-31.
    Some epistemologists think that the Bayesian ideals matter because we can approximate them. That is, our attitudes can be more or less close to the ones of our ideal Bayesian counterpart. In this paper, I raise a worry for this justification of epistemic ideals. The worry is this: In order to correctly compare agents to their ideal counterparts, we need to imagine idealized agents who have the same relevant information, knowledge, or evidence. However, there are cases in which one’s ideal (...)
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  34. Optimizing Individual and Collective Reliability: A Puzzle.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (4):516-531.
    Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. This (...)
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  35. Informational Theories of Content and Mental Representation.Marc Artiga & Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3):613-627.
    Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory of representation. (...)
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  36. The Meaning of Biological Signals.Marc Artiga, Jonathan Birch & Manolo Martínez - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84:101348.
    We introduce the virtual special issue on content in signalling systems. The issue explores the uses and limits of ideas from evolutionary game theory and information theory for explaining the content of biological signals. We explain the basic idea of the Lewis-Skyrms sender-receiver framework, and we highlight three key themes of the issue: (i) the challenge of accounting for deception, misinformation and false content, (ii) the relevance of partial or total common interest to the evolution of meaningful signals, and (iii) (...)
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  37. Epistemic Consequentialism, Veritism, and Scoring Rules.Marc-Kevin Daoust & Charles Côté-Bouchard - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1741-1765.
    We argue that there is a tension between two monistic claims that are the core of recent work in epistemic consequentialism. The first is a form of monism about epistemic value, commonly known as veritism: accuracy is the sole final objective to be promoted in the epistemic domain. The other is a form of monism about a class of epistemic scoring rules: that is, strictly proper scoring rules are the only legitimate measures of inaccuracy. These two monisms, we argue, are (...)
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  38. The history of materialism and criticisms of its present importance.Friedrich Albert Lange - 1925 - New York,: Humanities Press. Edited by Ernest Chester Thomas.
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  39. Partiality and Meaning.Benjamin Lange - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-28.
    Why do relationships of friendship and love support partiality, but not relationships of hatred or commitments of racism? Where does partiality end and why? I take the intuitive starting point that important cases of partiality are meaningful. I develop a view whereby meaning is understood in terms of transcending self-limitations in order to connect with things of external value. I then show how this view can be used to distinguish central cases of legitimate partiality from cases of illegitimate partiality and (...)
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  40. Liberal Representationalism: A Deflationist Defense.Marc Artiga - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (3):407-430.
    The idea that only complex brains can possess genuine representations is an important element in mainstream philosophical thinking. An alternative view, which I label ‘liberal representationalism’, holds that we should accept the existence of many more full-blown representations, from activity in retinal ganglion cells to the neural states produced by innate releasing mechanisms in cognitively unsophisticated organisms. A promising way of supporting liberal representationalism is to show it to be a consequence of our best naturalistic theories of representation. However, several (...)
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  41. The Intrinsic Value of Liberty for Non-Human Animals.Marc G. Wilcox - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 55 (4):685-703.
    The prevalent views of animal liberty among animal advocates suggest that liberty is merely instrumentally valuable and invasive paternalism is justified. In contrast to this popular view, I argue that liberty is intrinsically good for animals. I suggest that animal well-being is best accommodated by an Objective List Theory and that liberty is an irreducible component of animal well-being. As such, I argue that it is good for animals to possess liberty even if possessing liberty does not contribute towards their (...)
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  42. The Enmity Relationship as Justified Negative Partiality.Benjamin Lange & Joshua Brandt - forthcoming - In Monika Betzler & Jörg Löschke (eds.), The Ethics of Relationships: Broadening the Scope. Oxford University Press.
    Existing discussions of partiality have primarily examined special personal relationships between family, friends, or co-nationals. The negative analogue of such relationships – for example, the relationship of enmity – has, by contrast, been largely neglected. This chapter explores this adverse relation in more detail and considers the special reasons generated by it. We suggest that enmity can involve justified negative partiality, allowing members to give less consideration to each other’s interests. We then consider whether the negative partiality of enmity can (...)
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  43. Bridging the Responsibility Gap in Automated Warfare.Marc Champagne & Ryan Tonkens - 2015 - Philosophy and Technology 28 (1):125-137.
    Sparrow argues that military robots capable of making their own decisions would be independent enough to allow us denial for their actions, yet too unlike us to be the targets of meaningful blame or praise—thereby fostering what Matthias has dubbed “the responsibility gap.” We agree with Sparrow that someone must be held responsible for all actions taken in a military conflict. That said, we think Sparrow overlooks the possibility of what we term “blank check” responsibility: A person of sufficiently high (...)
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  44. Signals are minimal causes.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Synthese 198 (9):8581-8599.
    Although the definition of ‘signal’ has been controversial for some time within the life sciences, current approaches seem to be converging toward a common analysis. This powerful framework can satisfactorily accommodate many cases of signaling and captures some of its main features. This paper argues, however, that there is a central feature of signals that so far has been largely overlooked: its special causal role. More precisely, I argue that a distinctive feature of signals is that they are minimal causes. (...)
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  45. Illusory Signs as Frustrated Expectations: Undoing Descartes’ Overblown Response.Marc Champagne - 2023 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (3):1073-1096.
    Descartes held that it is impossible to make true statements about what we perceive, but I go over alleged cases of illusory experience to show why such a skeptical conclusion (and recourse to God) is overblown. The overreaction, I contend, stems from an insufficient awareness of the habitual expectations brought to any given experience. These expectations manifest themselves in motor terms, as perception constantly prompts and updates an embodied posture of readiness for what might come next. Such habitual anticipations work (...)
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  46. A Less Simplistic Metaphysics: Peirce’s Layered Theory of Meaning as a Layered Theory of Being.Marc Champagne - 2015 - Sign Systems Studies 43 (4):523–552.
    This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric (...)
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  47. Why Images Cannot be Arguments, But Moving Ones Might.Marc Champagne & Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen - 2020 - Argumentation 34 (2):207-236.
    Some have suggested that images can be arguments. Images can certainly bolster the acceptability of individual premises. We worry, though, that the static nature of images prevents them from ever playing a genuinely argumentative role. To show this, we call attention to a dilemma. The conclusion of a visual argument will either be explicit or implicit. If a visual argument includes its conclusion, then that conclusion must be demarcated from the premise or otherwise the argument will beg the question. If (...)
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  48. Experience and Life as Ever‐Present Constraints on Knowledge.Marc Champagne - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (2):235-245.
    This essay argues that acknowledging the existence of mind-independent facts is a matter of vital importance, in that acquiescence before the layout of the world is something demanded of knowing agents from the most elementary empirical deliverance to the most abstract construct. Building on the idea that normativity requires the presence of more than one option to choose from, the essay shows how the cessation of one's life is the disjunctive alternative of any experiential episode. This much has been missed, (...)
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  49. Unsolvable problems, visual imagery, and explanatory satisfaction.Marc F. Krellenstein - 1995 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 16 (3):235-54.
    It has been suggested that certain problems may be unsolvable because of the mind's cognitive structure, but we may wonder what problems, and exactly why. The ultimate origin of the universe and the mind-body problem seem to be two such problems. As to why, Colin McGinn has argued that the mind-body problem is unsolvable because any theoretical concepts about the brain will be observation-based and unable to connect to unobservable subjective experience. McGinn's argument suggests a requirement of imagability -- an (...)
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  50. Kantian Humility and Randian Hubris?Marc Champagne - 2023 - Reason Papers 43 (1):53–69.
    Ayn Rand and Immanuel Kant had profound disagreements, not just about the possible scope of knowledge, but (more importantly) about the possible scope of philosophy, especially metaphysics. This paper explores those disagreements, steel-manning both sides. My conclusion is that 1) both thinkers have worthwhile points to make, yet 2) Rand is guilty of poor scholarship while 3) Kant is guilty of appeal to ignorance. Despite the fallacious nature of (3), I stress that ignorance is not by itself something that philosophers (...)
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