In “What Does Environmental Protection Protect?” Mark Sagoff argues that there is no ecological way to test the claim that natural ecosystems are complex adaptive systems. In this critical commentary, I recreate that argument, object to it, and attempt to clarify its normative upshot. I show that Sagoff relies on substantive assumptions about (1) the tools and methods of ecological science, (2) what can be done with those tools and methods, and (3) ecology’s being separable from other (...) disciplines, all of which are controversial and in need of defense. I also identify five different ways that one might interpret the action-guiding recommendation that Sagoff wants to make on the basis of that argument, and I explain why all five are somewhat problematic. (shrink)

In a (2016) paper in this journal, I defuse allegations that theoretical ecological research is problematic because it relies on teleological metaphysical assumptions. Mark Sagoff offers a formal reply. In it, he concedes that I succeeded in establishing that ecologists abandoned robust teleological views long ago and that they use teleological characterizations as metaphors that aid in developing mechanistic explanations of ecological phenomena. Yet, he contends that I did not give enduring criticisms of theoretical ecology a fair shake (...) in my paper. He says this is because enduring criticisms center on concerns about the nature of ecological networks and forces, the instrumentality of ecological laws and theoretical models, and the relation between theoretical and empirical methods in ecology that that paper does not broach. Below I set apart the distinct criticisms Sagoff presents in his commentary and respond to each in turn. (shrink)

In nearly forty years’ of work, Simon Blackburn has done more than anyone to expand our imaginations about the aspirations for broadly projectivist/expressivist theorizing in all areas of philosophy. I know that I am far from alone in that his work has often been a source of both inspiration and provocation for my own work. It might be tempting, in a volume of critical essays such as this, to pay tribute to Blackburn’s special talent for destructive polemic, by seeking to (...) take down that by which I’ve been most provoked over the years. But Blackburn’s biting wit has both more wit and more bite than I could hope to emulate. So instead I’ll try to emulate here what I’ve admired the most about Blackburn – the constructive vein of much of his work. (shrink)

Next SectionIn a recent article in this journal, John Skorupski alleges that the expressivist view developed in Being For fails on its own terms. However, in order to set up his criticism of my book, he helps himself to the very assumption that it is the main contribution of my book to show how to reject. It is hardly a problem for me that you can re-create the problem I showed how to solve by making the very assumption that I (...) showed led to the problem. This article illustrates what might have led to Skorupski's confusion. (shrink)

Sight is a capacity, and seeing is its exercise. Reflection on the sense in which sight is for the sake of seeing reveals distinct relations of dependence between sight and seeing, the capacity and its exercise. Moreover, these relations of dependence in turn reveal the nature of our perceptual capacities and their exercise. Specifically, if sight is for the sake of seeing, then sight will depend, in a certain sense, upon seeing, in a manner inconsistent with experiential monism. Thus reflection (...) on the power of perception forms the basis of an argument for experiential pluralism. (shrink)

This chapter puts to rest for all of eternity the self-undermining charge against conciliationism.

Stephen Yablo has argued that ascriptions of belief and knowledge are sensitive to _subject matter_ and that theorising in such terms may help resolve philosophical questions about the semantics of such ascriptions. _Truthmaker semantics_ offers a way of theorising about subject matters. My main aim in this paper is to investigate what a semantics for knowledge or belief ascriptions might look like within truthmaker semantics. I then discuss what the resulting account might have to say about the problem of logical (...) omniscience, the nature of concepts, and rational belief. (shrink)

This paper is about knowledge construction in music listening. It argues for an experiential approach to music cognition, stressing the dynamic-vectorial field of meaning rather than the symbolic field. Starting from the conceptual framework of deixis and indexical devices, it elaborates on the concept of pointing as a heuristic guide for sense-making which allows the listener to conceive of perceptual elements in terms of salience, valence and semantical weight. As such, the act of (mental) pointing can be predicative, either in (...) a nominalistic or processual way, giving a description of the temporal evolution of a situation as against episodic nominalizations that refer to just one single instance of the process. The latter, especially, are characterized by distancing and polarization between the listener and the music, allowing him/her to deal with the music also at a level of mental imagery and to construct a mental or cognitive map of its unfolding. (shrink)

This chapter lays out a case that with the proper perspective on the place of epistemology within normative inquiry more generally, it is possible to appreciate what was on the right track about some of the early approaches to the analysis of knowledge, and to improve on the obvious failures which led them to be rejected. Drawing on more general principles about reasons, their weight, and their relationship to justification, it offers answers to problems about defeat and the conditional fallacy (...) that plagued early defeasibility analyses of knowledge and offers a sketch of a contemporary alternative that is motivated by the idea that knowledge requires the right kind of “match” between objective and subjective factors. (shrink)

The best writing of Mark Pettinelli, about cognitive psychology, cognitive science, etc.

In his groundbreaking book, Thin Objects, Linnebo (2018) argues for an account of neo-Fregean abstraction principles and thin existence that does not rely on analyticity or conceptual rules. It instead relies on a metaphysical notion he calls “sufficiency”. In this short discussion, I defend the analytic or conceptual rule account of thin existence.

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

Provides an overview of Mark Sharlow's philosophical work with summaries of his positions. Includes references and links to his writings.

One justification for preregistering research hypotheses, methods, and analyses is that it improves the transparent evaluation of the severity of hypothesis tests. In this article, I consider two cases in which preregistration does not improve this evaluation. First, I argue that, although preregistration can facilitate the transparent evaluation of severity in Mayo’s error statistical philosophy of science, it does not facilitate this evaluation in Popper’s theory-centric approach. To illustrate, I show that associated concerns about Type I error rate inflation are (...) only relevant in the error statistical approach and not in a theory-centric approach. Second, I argue that a preregistered test procedure that allows deviations in its implementation does not provide a more transparent evaluation of Mayoian severity than a non-preregistered procedure. In particular, I argue that sample-based validity-enhancing deviations cause an unknown inflation of the test procedure’s Type I (familywise) error rate and, consequently, an unknown reduction in its capability to license inferences severely. I conclude that preregistration does not improve the transparent evaluation of severity in Popper’s philosophy of science or when deviations are allowed. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how and why personal identity might be essentially narrative in nature. My topic is the question of personal identity in the strict sense of identity—the question of which person you are, and how that person is extended in space, time, and quality. In this my question appears to contrast with the question of personal identity in the sense sought by teenagers and sufferers of mid-life crises who are trying to ‘find themselves’. But in fact it (...) will be key to my argument that these questions are not distinct and independent. Whereas Parfit was concerned, in his work on personal identity, with how he was extended over time, the teenager who is finding themselves is concerned with how they are extended in quality. Indeed, the core of my argument is that because narrative is the key to understanding how we are extended in quality, and quality is just one more dimension along which we are extended, along with space and time, narrative must also be the clue as to how we are extended in space and time. You, I will argue, are the protagonist in the best story of your life. (shrink)

In recent work Mary Kate McGowan presents an account of oppressive speech inspired by David Lewis's analysis of conversational kinematics. Speech can effect identity-based oppression, she argues, by altering 'the conversational score', which is to say, roughly, that it can introduce presuppositions and expectations into a conversation, and thus determine what sort of subsequent conversational 'moves' are apt, correct, felicitous, etc., in a manner that oppresses members of a certain group (e.g. because the suppositions and expectations derogate or demean members (...) of that group). In keeping with the Lewisian picture, McGowan stresses the asymmetric pliability of conversational scores. She argues that it is easier to introduce (for example) sexist presuppositions and expectations into a conversation than it is to remove them. Responding to a sexist remark, she thus suggests, is like trying to "unring a bell". I begin by situating McGowan's work in the wider literature on speech and social hierarchy, and explaining how her account of oppressive speech improves upon the work of others in its explication of the relationship between individuals' verbal conduct and structurally oppressive social arrangements. I then propose an explanation and supportive elaboration of McGowan's claims about the asymmetric pliability of conversations involving identity-oppressive speech. Rather than regarding such asymmetry as a sui generis phenomenon, I show how we can understand it as a consequence of a more general asymmetry between making things salient and un-salient in speech, and I show how this asymmetry also operates in various cases that interested Lewis. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But despite its (...) importance, the Common Subject Problem is essentially invisible on many contemporary ways of carving up the problems of metaethics and normative ethical theory. My aim, therefore, is to make progress – in part by naming the problem, but also by beginning to sketch out the contours of what gives the problem its force, by distinguishing between different paths of response to the problem and assessing some of their chief merits, and finally, by distinguishing the Common Subject Problem from another problem with which it has come to be conflated. This nearby problem is the Moral Twin Earth Problem. Whereas the Common Subject Problem is a problem about what property ‘wrong’ could refer to, the Moral Twin Earth Problem is a problem about how ‘wrong’ could refer to it. The upshot of the paper, therefore, is to rescue one of the historically significant problems in normative ethics and metaethics – a problem that is essentially about normative semantics – from the illusion that has persisted over the last twenty years that it is really, somehow, a problem about metasemantics. Once we have reclaimed this problem, we can see that it could still be a problem even if there are no distinctively metasemantic problems in metaethics at all, that it is a problem faced by a wider variety of views, and that the space of possible solutions is much wider and more interesting for normative theory, moral psychology, and moral epistemology. (shrink)

Keepsakes are nostalgic objects par excellence. We value keepsakes because they prompt nostalgic memories of the past. But perhaps more importantly, we also value them because they afford a feeling of contact with that which they remind us of. Drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, this chapter aims to give an account of the nature and value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects. Keepsakes, it argues, are objects that bear a material continuity with some person, event, or place from one’s (...) past to which one has a personal attachment. To understand the distinctive experiential value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects, however, the chapter argues that we need to invoke the imagination. Keepsakes manifest the presence of the past by prompting one to imaginatively project what a keepsake is historically connected with onto the object as one experiences it in the present. (shrink)

Scientists often adjust their significance threshold during null hypothesis significance testing in order to take into account multiple testing and multiple comparisons. This alpha adjustment has become particularly relevant in the context of the replication crisis in science. The present article considers the conditions in which this alpha adjustment is appropriate and the conditions in which it is inappropriate. A distinction is drawn between three types of multiple testing: disjunction testing, conjunction testing, and individual testing. It is argued that alpha (...) adjustment is only appropriate in the case of disjunction testing, in which at least one test result must be significant in order to reject the associated joint null hypothesis. Alpha adjustment is inappropriate in the case of conjunction testing, in which all relevant results must be significant in order to reject the joint null hypothesis. Alpha adjustment is also inappropriate in the case of individual testing, in which each individual result must be significant in order to reject each associated individual null hypothesis. The conditions under which each of these three types of multiple testing is warranted are examined. It is concluded that researchers should not automatically assume that alpha adjustment is necessary during multiple testing. Illustrations are provided in relation to joint studywise hypotheses and joint multiway ANOVAwise hypotheses. (shrink)

It is an honor to receive such careful and attentive criticism. In this response, I attempt to put the criticisms of the reasons latesters into the context of my argumentative aims in the book and to point toward how they might be answered.

Several researchers have recently argued that p values lose their meaning in exploratory analyses due to an unknown inflation of the alpha level (e.g., Nosek & Lakens, 2014; Wagenmakers, 2016). For this argument to be tenable, the familywise error rate must be defined in relation to the number of hypotheses that are tested in the same study or article. Under this conceptualization, the familywise error rate is usually unknowable in exploratory analyses because it is usually unclear how many hypotheses have (...) been tested on a spontaneous basis and then omitted from the final research report. In the present article, I argue that it is inappropriate to conceptualize the familywise error rate in relation to the number of hypotheses that are tested. Instead, it is more appropriate to conceptualize familywise error in relation to the number of different tests that are conducted on the same null hypothesis in the same study. Under this conceptualization, alpha level adjustments in exploratory analyses are (a) less necessary and (b) objectively verifiable. As a result, p values do not lose their meaning in exploratory analyses. (shrink)

According to the Book of Common Prayer, we have sinned against God “in thought, word, and deed.” In this paper I’ll explore one way of understanding what it might mean to sin against God in thought—the idea that we can at least potentially wrong God by what we believe. I will be interested in the philosophical tenability of this idea, and particularly in its potential consequences for the epistemology of religious belief and the problem of evil.

This article considers two important problems for the idea that what we ought to do is determined by the balance of competing reasons. The problems are distinct, but the object of the article is to explore how they admit of a single solution. It is a consequence of this solution that objective reasons—facts that count in favor—are in an important sense less objective than they have consistently been assumed to be. This raises but does not answer the question as to (...) what evidence we ever had that reasons are as objective as has been assumed. (shrink)

Remembering that there’s a difference between intellectual and perceptual attention can help us avoid miscommunication due to meaning different things by the same terms, which has been a particular problem during the last hundred years or so of the study of attention. I demonstrate this through analyzing in depth one such miscommunication that occurred in a philosophical criticism of the influential psychological text, Inattentional Blindness. But after making the distinction between perceptual attention and intellectual attention, and after making an effort (...) to keep this distinction in mind, we are still faced with the problem of specifying what makes intellectual attention distinct from perceptual attention. In the second half of this article, I discuss the range of proposals about how to understand intellectual attention that are present in the literature, and the problems with them. I do this with the aim of stimulating further discussion about how best to conceptualize intellectual attention, although I do not settle that further question within this paper. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We (...) Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

Review of part one of Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs.

Jago uses a Fitch-style argument in an attempt to demonstrate that every truth has a truthmaker. But Trueman shows that there is a parallel argument, this time to the conclusion that no truth has a truthmaker. Since we cannot accept both, we must ditch at least one Fitch. But which? Keywords: Truth, truthmaking, truthmaker maximalism, Fitch paradox, Robert Trueman.

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: because the attack set (...) Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 22 In _Unbelievable Errors_, Bart Streumer offers resourceful arguments against each of non-reductive realism, reductive realism, and non-cognitivism, in order to motivate his version of the normative error theory, according to which normative predicates ascribe properties that do not exist. In this contribution, I argue that none of the steps of this master argument succeed, and that Streumer’s arguments leave puzzles about what it means to ascribe a property at all.

Most philosophers find it puzzling how beliefs could wrong, and this leads them to conclude that they do not. So there is much philosophical work to be done in sorting out whether I am right to say that they do, as well as how this could be so. But in this paper I will take for granted that beliefs can wrong, and ask instead when beliefs wrong. My answer will be that beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. This answer has (...) three parts: that beliefs wrong only when they are false, that beliefs wrong only when they diminish, and that false diminishment is sufficient for wronging. I will seek to elaborate on and defend all three of these claims, but it is the first to which I will give the most attention. (shrink)

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...) is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers. (shrink)

The debate over the meanings of indexical expressions has relied heavily on the method of counterexamples. This paper challenges that method by showing that purported counterexamples can often be explained away by appeal to perspective shifts. For these counterexamples to establish anything about indexical reference, we must identify the conditions under which theorists can legitimately appeal to perspective shifts. Some tests for semantic content are considered and it is argued that none of them can tell us when appeal to perspective (...) shift is admissible. The paper then considers how we should proceed if we become convinced that there is no way to identify the content of indexical expressions, offering reasons in favour of a nihilist conception of character over an epistemicist or pluralist conception. (shrink)

This paper will examine the nature of mechanisms and the distinction between the relevant and irrelevant parts involved in a mechanism’s operation. I first consider Craver’s account of this distinction in his book on the nature of mechanisms, and explain some problems. I then offer a novel account of the distinction that appeals to some resources from Mackie’s theory of causation. I end by explaining how this account enables us to better understand what mechanisms are and their various features.

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, grief, (...) time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods. (shrink)

Research notes of Mark Pettinelli about cognitive science, cognitive psychology.

This collection of articles is almost all of the psychological writings of Mark Pettinelli.

An archive of Mark Sharlow's two blogs, "The Unfinishable Scroll" and "Religion: the Next Version." Covers Sharlow's views on metaphysics, epistemology, mind, science, religion, and politics. Includes topics and ideas not found in his papers.

Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a (...) specific proposition? Doxastic voluntarists hold that, at least in some circumstances—such as when the evidence is ambiguous—we can. Doxastic involuntarists, in contrast, maintain that we cannot. Some involuntarists hold that the concept of belief itself precludes the possibility of believing voluntarily. Others hold that the impossibility of voluntary belief is a contingent psychological fact. Historically, the issue of doxastic voluntarism has been connected to how many think about religious commitment: a prominent view of faith is that it is a voluntary decision to believe. Furthermore, the issue of voluntarism has also been viewed as having bearing on fundamental questions in epistemology. For example, are epistemic norms duties to believe in certain ways? Are there practical or moral reasons to believe? If the answer to either question is “yes,” it seems some measure of voluntary doxastic control is required. -/- In section 1, we expand on the definition of doxastic voluntarism, and survey various kinds of control (e.g. direct, indirect, long-range) and the doxastic attitudes we might control (e.g. outright belief, withholding, credences). In section 2, we discuss a number of historical views on doxastic voluntarism. In section 3, we survey motivations for rejecting doxastic voluntarism. There are two general strategies: arguments that appeal to psychological considerations, and conceptual arguments regarding the nature of belief. In section 4, we survey five approaches to defending voluntarism: those that appeal to epistemic permissivism, doxastic compatibilism, skepticism, one-off considerations, and non-standard views of belief. In section 5, we cover empirical work on doxastic voluntarism. The last two sections discuss two implications of voluntarism. In section 6, we discuss voluntarism’s implications for the ethics of belief, and in section 7, we discuss issues at the intersection of voluntarism and religious faith. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the role for anticipated regret in major life decision-making, focusing on how it is employed by realistic decision-makers in a variety of realistic cases. I argue that the most obvious answers to how regret might matter in decision do not make these cases intelligible, but that we can make them intelligible through consideration of the significance of narrative in our own self-understanding.

Over centuries, philosophers have theorised about what constitutes ‘the good’ regarding behavioural choice. Characteristically, these attempts have tried to decipher the nature and substantive values that link the apparent trichotomous nature of the human psyche, variously articulated in terms of human reasoning, feeling, and desiring. Of the three, most emphasis has focused on the unique human characteristic of reasoned behavioural choice in terms of its relationship to the emotions. This article determines the principle dynamics behind 'ethical' behaviour: In the nervous (...) system, efferent nerves, otherwise known as motor neurones, carry nerve impulses away from the central nervous system to effectors such as muscles. A great deal of neural activity underpins‘efferent information processing’. What follows is a categorisation of the structure of 'efferent information processing' in a manner, that enhances our understanding of the attempts of philosophers, from Plato to Russell, to explain ‘what it is to be behave well’. (shrink)

I develop and defend a truthmaker semantics for the relevant logic R. The approach begins with a simple philosophical idea and develops it in various directions, so as to build a technically adequate relevant semantics. The central philosophical idea is that truths are true in virtue of specific states. Developing the idea formally results in a semantics on which truthmakers are relevant to what they make true. A very natural notion of conditionality is added, giving us relevant implication. I then (...) investigate ways to add conjunction, disjunction, and negation; and I discuss how to justify contraposition and excluded middle within a truthmaker semantics. (shrink)

This paper considers the connection between the three-place relation, R is a reason for X to do A and the two-place relation, R is a reason to do A. I consider three views on which the former is to be analyzed in terms of the latter. I argue that these views are widely held, and explain the role that they play in motivating interesting substantive ethical theories. But I reject them in favor of a more obvious analysis, which goes the (...) other way around. (shrink)