Social media platforms have been rapidly increasing the number of informational labels they are appending to user-generated content in order to indicate the disputed nature of messages or to provide context. The rise of this practice constitutes an important new chapter in social media governance, as companies are often choosing this new “middle way” between a laissez-faire approach and more drastic remedies such as removing or downranking content. Yet information labeling as a practice has, thus far, been mostly tactical, reactive, (...) and without strategic underpinnings. In this paper, we argue against defining success as merely the curbing of misinformation spread. The key to thinking about labeling strategically is to consider it from an epistemic perspective and to take as a starting point the “social” dimension of online social networks. The strategy we articulate emphasizes how the moderation system needs to improve the epistemic position and relationships of platform users — i.e., their ability to make good judgements about the sources and quality of the information with which they interact on the platform — while also appropriately respecting sources, seekers, and subjects of information. A systematic and normatively grounded approach can improve content moderation efforts by providing clearer accounts of what the goals are, how success should be defined and measured, and where ethical considerations should be taken into consideration. We consider implications for the policies of social media companies, propose new potential metrics for success, and review research and innovation agendas in this regard. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

Hope, in its propositional construction "I hope that p," is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that not-p. On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that not-p. But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p. Data from conjoining hope self-ascription with outright assertions, with (...) first- and third-person knowledge ascriptions, and with factive predicates suggest a problem: when combined with a plausible principle on the rationality of hope, they suggest that fallibilism is false. By contrast, the infallibilist about knowledge can straightforwardly explain why knowledge would be incompatible with hope, and can offer a simple and unified explanation of all the linguistic data introduced here. This suggests that fallibilists bear an explanatory burden which has been hitherto overlooked. (shrink)

The Identity principle says that conditionals with the form 'If p, then p' are logical truths. Identity is overwhelmingly plausible, and has rarely been explicitly challenged. But a wide range of conditionals nonetheless invalidate it. I explain the problem, and argue that the culprit is the principle known as Import-Export, which we must thus reject. I then explore how we can reject Import-Export in a way that still makes sense of the intuitions that support it, arguing that the differences between (...) indicative and subjunctive conditionals play a key role in solving this puzzle. (shrink)

Preservationism states that memory preserves the justification of the beliefs it preserves. More precisely: if S formed a justified belief that p at t1 and retains in memory a belief that p until t2, then S's belief that p is prima facie justified via memory at t2. Preservationism is an unchallenged orthodoxy in the epistemology of memory. Advocates include Sven Bernecker, Tyler Burge, Alvin Goldman, Gilbert Harman, Michael Huemer, Matthew McGrath, and Thomas Senor. I develop three dilemmas for it, (...) in part by drawing on research in cognitive psychology. The dilemmas centre on preservationism's implications for certain cases involving either stored beliefs, forgotten evidence, or recollection failure. Each dilemma shows that preservationism either is false or lacks key support. (shrink)

The problem of stored beliefs is that of explaining how non-occurrent, seemingly justified beliefs are indeed justified. Internalism about epistemic justification, the view that one’s mental life alone determines what one is justified in believing, allegedly cannot solve this problem. This paper provides a solution. It asks: Does having a belief that p require having a special relation to a mental representation that p? If the answer is yes, then there are no stored beliefs, and so there is no problem. (...) Drawing on extensive research in cognitive psychology, this paper argues that memory doesn’t store the representations required for stored belief, and we don’t bear the special relation to anything memory does store. On the leading “no” answer, a belief is roughly a set of dispositions. This paper argues that a justified belief is then best understood as a set of dispositions. Since these dispositions are mental, internalism can count the right stored beliefs as justified. (shrink)

What does 'might' mean? One hypothesis is that 'It might be raining' is essentially an avowal of ignorance like 'For all I know, it's raining'. But it turns out these two constructions embed in different ways, in particular as parts of larger constructions like Wittgenstein's 'It might be raining and it's not' and Moore's 'It's raining and I don't know it', respectively. A variety of approaches have been developed to account for those differences. All approaches agree that both Moore sentences (...) and Wittgenstein sentences are classically consistent. In this paper I argue against this consensus. I adduce a variety of new data which I argue can best be accounted for if we treat Wittgenstein sentences as being classically inconsistent. This creates a puzzle, since there is decisive reason to think that 'Might p' is classically consistent with 'Not p'. How can it also be that 'Might p and not p' and 'Not p and might p' are classically inconsistent? To make sense of this situation, I propose a new theory of epistemic modals and their interaction with embedding operators. This account makes sense of the subtle embedding behavior of epistemic modals, shedding new light on their meaning and, more broadly, the dynamics of information in natural language. -/- . (shrink)

Eavesdropping judgments (judgments about truth, retraction, and consistency across contexts) about epistemic modals have been used in recent years to argue for a radical thesis: that truth is assessment-relative. We argue that judgments for 'I think that p' pattern in strikingly similar ways to judgments for 'Might p' and 'Probably p'. We argue for this by replicating three major experiments involving the latter and adding a condition with the form 'I think that p', showing that subjects respond in the same (...) way to 'thinks' as to modals. This poses a serious challenge to relativist treatments of the modal judgments, since a relativist treatment of the corresponding 'thinks' judgments is totally implausible, so if a unified account of the phenomena is to be found, it cannot be a relativist one. We briefly sketch how a unified account might look. (shrink)

There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’-claim like and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in 'It must be raining out' versus 'It is raining out. It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must p' and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating (...) that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature. (shrink)

Import-Export says that a conditional 'If p, if q, r' is always equivalent to the conditional 'If p and q, r'. I argue that Import-Export does not sit well with a classical approach to conjunction: given some plausible and widely accepted principles about conditionals, Import-Export together with classical conjunction leads to absurd consequences. My main goal is to draw out these surprising connections. In concluding I argue that the right response is to reject Import-Export and adopt instead a limited version (...) which better fits natural language data; accounts for all the intuitions that motivate Import-Export in the first place; and fits better with a classical conjunction. (shrink)

Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knifework. “Ordinary butchers,” he replied “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also (...) Watson 2003, 46). Plato famously employed this image as an analogy for the reality of his Forms (Phaedrus, 265e). Just like an animal, the world comes pre-divided for us. Ideally, our best theories will be those which “carve nature at its joints”. While Plato employed the “carving” metaphor to convey his views about the reality of his celebrated Forms, its most common contemporary use involves the success of science -- particularly, its success in identifying distinct kinds of things. Scientists often report discovering new kinds of things -- a new species of mammal or novel kind of fundamental particle, for example -- or uncovering more information about already familiar kinds. Moreover, we often notice considerable overlap in different approaches to classification. As Ernst Mayr put it: No naturalist would question the reality of the species he may find in his garden, whether it is a catbird, chickadee, robin, or starling. And the same is true for trees or flowering plants. Species at a given locality are almost invariably separated from each other by a distinct gap. Nothing convinced me so fully of the reality of species as the observation . . . that the Stone Age natives in the mountains of New Guinea recognize as species exactly the same entities of nature as a western scientist. (Mayr 1987, 146) Such agreement is certainly suggestive. It suggests that taxonomies are discoveries rather than mere inventions. Couple this with their utility in scientific inference and explanation and we have compelling reason for accepting the objective, independent reality of many different natural kinds of things.. (shrink)

Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns (...) the relevance of non-epistemic factors we might call "future-comparative" – e.g., that you’ll have more decisive evidence on whether p tomorrow – to the justification of suspending judgment. The second, from Jane Friedman, is to explain the point of the neutral attitude without appealing to inquiry and thus taking goal-related factors, which are not epistemic, such as the value of the goal or the prospects for finding means to achieve it, to bear on the justification of the neutral attitude. My defense of traditionalism relies on distinguishing three ways of being neutral on a question: agnosticism, inquiry and suspension of judgment. Traditionalism is saved because, of these, agnosticism alone is a genuine doxastic attitude. (shrink)

In this paper, the author spells out St. Bonaventure's magisterial teaching on the possibility of an eternal world, found in his 'Commentaria in II Sententiarum', d. 1, p. 1, a. 1, q. 2. The entirety of this 'quaestio' is treated at length in order to delineate its structure and indicate its reliance on both theological and philosophical premises. Hence, the twofold dependency of St. Bonaventure's position on Scripture and on arguments against an actual infinity is made clear. The author concludes (...) with a Thomistic response to the Seraphic Doctor's position, based solely on the Angelic Doctor's late treatise 'De aeternitate mundi', in which St. Thomas endeavors to place the eternal world question on purely philosophical grounds and also doubts the plausibility of arguments against the possiblity of an actual infinity. (shrink)

Although belief formation is sometimes automatic, there are occasions in which we have the power to put it off, to wait on belief-formation. Waiting in this sense seems assessable by epistemic norms. This paper explores what form such norms might take: the nature and their content. A key question is how these norms relate to epistemic norms on belief-formation: could we have cases in which one ought to believe that p but also ought to wait on forming a belief on (...) whether p? Plausibly not. But if not, how can we explain this impossibility? I suggest that the best resolution is to view the traditional core norms on belief as themselves conditional in a certain sense, one that I think has independent plausibility. The results of this investigation may also tell us something about epistemic norms on suspension, on the assumption, which I defend elsewhere, that suspension is waiting. (shrink)

Compare the following conditionals: 'If John is not in Paris, he is in France' versus 'If John is in France, he is not in Paris.' The second sounds entirely natural, whereas the first sounds quite strange. This contrast is puzzling, because these two conditionals have the same structure at a certain level of logical abstraction, namely 'If ¬p+, then p.' -/- We argue that existing theories of informational oddness do not distinguish between these conditionals. We do not have an account (...) of the divergence in judgments about the two, but we think this is a fascinating puzzle which we pose here in the hope others will be able to solve it. (shrink)

Background: Screen time among adults represents a continuing and growing problem in relation to health behaviors and health outcomes. However, no instrument currently exists in the literature that quantifies the use of modern screen-based devices. The primary purpose of this study was to develop and assess the reliability of a new screen time questionnaire, an instrument designed to quantify use of multiple popular screen-based devices among the US population. -/- Methods: An 18-item screen-time questionnaire was created to quantify use of (...) commonly used screen devices (e.g. television, smartphone, tablet) across different time points during the week (e.g. weekday, weeknight, weekend). Test-retest reliability was assessed through intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs) and standard error of measurement (SEM). The questionnaire was delivered online using Qualtrics and administered through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). -/- Results: Eighty MTurk workers completed full study participation and were included in the final analyses. All items in the screen time questionnaire showed fair to excellent relative reliability (ICCs = 0.50–0.90; all < 0.000), except for the item inquiring about the use of smartphone during an average weekend day (ICC = 0.16, p = 0.069). The SEM values were large for all screen types across the different periods under study. -/- Conclusions: Results from this study suggest this self-administered questionnaire may be used to successfully classify individuals into different categories of screen time use (e.g. high vs. low); however, it is likely that objective measures are needed to increase precision of screen time assessment. (shrink)

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming (...) certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder has recently presented apparent counterexamples to the standard account of the distinction between the right and the wrong kinds of reasons. We argue that these examples appear to refute the standard account only because they blur the distinction between two kinds of reasoning: reasoning about whether to intend or believe that p and reasoning about whether to take up the question of whether to intend or believe that p.

To many, judgment has seemed a locus of cognitive agency, a kind of cognitive mental act. In one minimal sense, judgment is something one does. I consider whether judgment is more robustly agential: is it a kind of action done with an aim? The most attractive version of this sort of position takes judging that p to affirming that p with an alethic aim, an aim such as affirming truly. I argue that such views have unacceptable consequences. Acts done with (...) aims, in general, can be based only indirectly on evidence that one would attain the aim in so acting. It follows that if alethic aims theories of judgment were correct, a judgment that p could be based only indirectly on evidence for p. This itself would be problematic. But the problems extend further. Given the connection between judgment and belief-formation, it would follow, further, that the beliefs we form through judgment could at best be only indirectly based on evidence for p. On these theories, the direct bases for a judgment that p would have to be either a belief that p or a belief that it’s likely that p. The former cannot support belief-formation and the latter supports at best epistemically inappropriate belief-formation. I conclude that there is a hard limit on how robustly agential judgment can be. (shrink)

This work intentionally joins Stephen A. McKnight’s The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought in arguing that Sir Francis Bacon was more deeply religious than he is conventionally thought to have been. Though the book is full of interesting suggestions, a lack of breadth, rigor, and precision will leave many readers unconvinced. . . . Those who know the corpus and secondary literature enough to read critically will find here provocative suggestions and intriguing leads. Others will need to be cautious (...) about the book’s arguments and conclusions. (shrink)

Importance: Patients with remitted major depressive disorder (MDD) were previously found to display abnormal functional magnetic resonance imaging connectivity (fMRI) between the right superior anterior temporal lobe (RSATL) and the subgenual cingulate cortex and adjacent septal region (SCSR) when experiencing self-blaming emotions relative to emotions related to blaming others (eg, "indignation or anger toward others"). This finding provided the first neural signature of biases toward overgeneralized self-blaming emotions (eg, "feeling guilty for everything"), known to have a key role in cognitive (...) vulnerability to MDD. It is unknown whether this neural signature predicts risk of recurrence, a crucial step in establishing its potential as a prognostic biomarker, which is urgently needed for stratification into pathophysiologically more homogeneous subgroups and for novel treatments. -/- Objective: To use fMRI in remitted MDD at baseline to test the hypothesis that RSATL-SCSR connectivity for self-blaming relative to other-blaming emotions predicts subsequent recurrence of depressive episodes. -/- Design, setting, and participants: A prospective cohort study from June 16, 2011, to October 10, 2014, in a clinical research facility completed by 75 psychotropic medication-free patients with remitted MDD and no relevant comorbidity. In total, 31 remained in stable remission, and 25 developed a recurring episode over the 14 months of clinical follow-up and were included in the primary analysis. Thirty-nine control participants with no personal or family history of MDD were recruited for further comparison. -/- Main outcomes and measures: Between-group difference (recurring vs stable MDD) in RSATL connectivity, with an a priori SCSR region of interest for self-blaming vs other-blaming emotions. -/- Results: We corroborated our hypothesis that during the experience of self-blaming vs other-blaming emotions, RSATL-SCSR connectivity predicted risk of subsequent recurrence. The recurring MDD group showed higher connectivity than the stable MDD group (familywise error-corrected P < .05 over the a priori SCSR region of interest) and the control group. In addition, the recurring MDD group also exhibited RSATL hyperconnectivity with the right ventral putamen and claustrum and the temporoparietal junction. Together, these regions predicted recurrence with 75% accuracy. -/- Conclusions and relevance: To our knowledge, this study is the first to provide a robust demonstration of an fMRI signature of recurrence risk in remitted MDD. Additional studies are needed for its further optimization and validation as a prognostic biomarker. (shrink)

Bayesian confirmation theory is rife with confirmation measures. Many of them differ from each other in important respects. It turns out, though, that all the standard confirmation measures in the literature run counter to the so-called “Reverse Matthew Effect” (“RME” for short). Suppose, to illustrate, that H1 and H2 are equally successful in predicting E in that p(E | H1)/p(E) = p(E | H2)/p(E) > 1. Suppose, further, that initially H1 is less probable than H2 in that p(H1) < (...) p(H2). Then by RME it follows that the degree to which E confirms H1 is greater than the degree to which it confirms H2. But by all the standard confirmation measures in the literature, in contrast, it follows that the degree to which E confirms H1 is less than or equal to the degree to which it confirms H2. It might seem, then, that RME should be rejected as implausible. Festa (2012), however, argues that there are scientific contexts in which RME holds. If Festa’s argument is sound, it follows that there are scientific contexts in which none of the standard confirmation measures in the literature is adequate. Festa’s argument is thus interesting, important, and deserving of careful examination. I consider five distinct respects in which E can be related to H, use them to construct five distinct ways of understanding confirmation measures, which I call “Increase in Probability”, “Partial Dependence”, “Partial Entailment”, “Partial Discrimination”, and “Popper Corroboration”, and argue that each such way runs counter to RME. The result is that it is not at all clear that there is a place in Bayesian confirmation theory for RME. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

This paper initiates analytic inquiry into the metaphysics of masculinity. I argue that individual masculinities (such as ‘clone masculinity’ and ‘incel masculinity’) are distinct homeostatic property cluster kinds related to gender structures via processes of adherence, failed-adherence, selective adherence, and/or reinterpretation with respect to male-coded social norms.

The notion that business organizations are akin to Aristotelian political communities has been a central feature of research into virtue ethics in business. In this article, I begin by outlining this “community thesis” and go on to argue that psychological research into the “just world fallacy” presents it with a significant challenge. The just world fallacy undermines our ability to implement an Aristotelian conception of justice, to each as he or she is due, and imperils the relational equality required for (...) shared participation in communities. In the final section, I offer a description of what Aristotelian community might look like within organizations, and some suggestions about how it may be possible to resist the challenge posed by the just world fallacy. (shrink)

A probability distribution is regular if it does not assign probability zero to any possible event. While some hold that probabilities should always be regular, three counter-arguments have been posed based on examples where, if regularity holds, then perfectly similar events must have different probabilities. Howson and Benci et al. have raised technical objections to these symmetry arguments, but we see here that their objections fail. Howson says that Williamson’s “isomorphic” events are not in fact isomorphic, but Howson is speaking (...) of set-theoretic representations of events in a probability model. While those sets are not isomorphic, Williamson’s physical events are, in the relevant sense. Benci et al. claim that all three arguments rest on a conflation of different models, but they do not. They are founded on the premise that similar events should have the same probability in the same model, or in one case, on the assumption that a single rotation-invariant distribution is possible. Having failed to refute the symmetry arguments on such technical grounds, one could deny their implicit premises, which is a heavy cost, or adopt varying degrees of instrumentalism or pluralism about regularity, but that would not serve the project of accurately modelling chances. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to (...) a specification of the properties these intentions need to have in order to be genuine commitments. I then show how a structure of conditional intentions with these properties settles a collection of agents on engaging in social interactions that display all the features typically associated with shared agency. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective (...) action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research. (shrink)

The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did (...) such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction. (shrink)

Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...) analysis, and hypothesis formulation. By bringing to the fore the differences and similarities between each of the four ways that anticipatory models are acquired, a more complete picture of both anticipatory behavior and its pervasive role in biological self-maintenance can be offered. In doing so, this article helps not only to shed light on how anticipatory behavior might arise in the wide range of organisms that it has been observed in but also to throw into relief the subtle and often still overlooked causal interplay between ontogenetic and phylogenetic plasticity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain what a protest is by using the resources of speech-act theory. First, we distinguish the object, redress, and means of a protest. This provided a way to think of atomic acts of protest as having dual communicative aspects, viz., a negative evaluation of the object and a connected prescription of redress. Second, we use Austin’s notion of a felicity condition to further characterize the dual communicative aspects of protest. This allows us to distinguish protest from (...) some other speech acts which also involve a negative evaluation of some object and a connected prescription of redress. Finally, we turn to Kukla and Lance’s idea of a normative functionalist analysis of speech acts to advance the view that protests are a complex speech act constituted by dual input normative statuses and dual output normative statuses. (shrink)

Recent work has defended “Euclidean” theories of set size, in which Cantor’s Principle (two sets have equally many elements if and only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them) is abandoned in favor of the Part-Whole Principle (if A is a proper subset of B then A is smaller than B). It has also been suggested that Gödel’s argument for the unique correctness of Cantor’s Principle is inadequate. Here we see from simple examples, not that Euclidean theories of set (...) size are wrong, but that they must be either very weak and narrow or largely arbitrary and misleading. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

Business ethics is often understood as a variety of professional ethics, and thus distinct from ordinary morality in an important way. This article seeks to challenge two ways of defending this claim: first, from the nature of business practice, and second, from the contribution of business. The former argument fails because it undermines our ability to rule out a professional-ethics approach to a number of disreputable practices. The latter argument fails because the contribution of business is extrinsic to business in (...) a way that distinguishes from the established professions. The article ultimately suggests we adopt a more aspirational approach to business ethics, which retains an appeal even in the face of charges of anti-capitalist irrelevance. (shrink)

There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously assert a ‘must’-claim versus those in which one can use the corresponding non-modal claim. But it is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is even harder to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must ϕ' and assertions of ϕ alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, coming to agreement that [[ϕ]] is true. In this paper I take on this (...) puzzle, known as Karttunen’s Problem. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for its prejacent. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I sketch a pragmatic derivation of Support. (shrink)

In this paper, I present two tools that help shed light on deep disagreements and their epistemological consequences. First, I argue that we are best off construing deep disagreements as disagreements over conflicting understandings of certain concepts. More specifically, I suggest that deep disagreements are disagreements over how to understand concepts that play what Michael Friedman calls a “constitutive” role for speakers. Second, I argue that we need a better understanding of what speakers are doing when they engage in deep (...) disagreements—what speech acts they are carrying out. I show that we are best off not reducing the relevant speech acts to more familiar speech act kinds, such as assertions or imperatives. I argue that when a speaker articulates an understanding of a concept, they are in part carrying out an act of stipulation. I provide an account of the pragmatics of stipulation and apply the account to examples of deep disagreement. Focusing on the stipulative dimension of deep disagreement opens up, in turn, a novel approach to defusing the epistemological challenges such disagreement seems to pose. (shrink)

This paper critically examines coincidence arguments and evolutionary debunking arguments against non-naturalist realism in metaethics. It advances a version of these arguments that goes roughly like this: Given a non-naturalist, realist metaethic, it would be cosmically coincidental if our first order normative beliefs were true. This coincidence undermines any prima facie justification enjoyed by those beliefs.

Many philosophers now see meaning in life as a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness. In this article, I raise a challenge to this view. Theories of meaning in life closely resemble theories of well-being, and there is a suspicion that the former collapse into the latter. I develop this challenge showing that (...) it is formidable. I then answer it by offering a novel account of what meaning in life is and how it differs from well-being. The account I offer is able to resist the strongest form of the challenge while also having much intuitive appeal. (shrink)

How ought we socially to categorize individuals with respect to sexual orientation? In this paper, I engage with philosophical work on the foundations of political solidarity as well as public health research on the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in order to develop a categorization scheme conducive to the normatively important aims of LGBTQIA+ social movements.

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...) conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

This chapter attends to somaesthetic expressions occurring irrespective of knowledge of the movement, using Mandalay’s Water Festival and Cairo’s Arab Spring as case studies. These celebrations and protests feature bodies creatively gravitating around urban structures and according to emotional, cultural concerns, all of this together defining city spaces for a time. Bodies also become venues for artistic refashioning, for example, through creative conversion of injuries into celebratory badges of dissent. Geared almost therapeutically towards life-improvement—albeit sometimes implicitly—these celebrations and protests also (...) have meliorative aspects that mark the somaesthetic movement. Moreover, they have a shared, public character stressed by Shusterman, but arguably lost on many because of his interest in self-focused meditation and the popular appeal of such exercises among those interested in body practices. (shrink)

The Knowledge Norm or Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA’s unified explanation of some of the earliest data (from Moorean conjunctions) adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals.

Conspiracy theories are typically thought to be examples of irrational beliefs, and thus unlikely to be warranted. However, recent work in Philosophy has challenged the claim that belief in conspiracy theories is irrational, showing that in a range of cases, belief in conspiracy theories is warranted. However, it is still often said that conspiracy theories are unlikely relative to non-conspiratorial explanations which account for the same phenomena. However, such arguments turn out to rest upon how we define what gets counted (...) both as a ‘conspiracy’ and a ‘conspiracy theory’, and such arguments rest upon shaky assumptions. It turns out that it is not clear that conspiracy theories are prima facie unlikely, and so the claim that such theories do not typically appear in our accounts of the best explanations for particular kinds of events needs to be reevaluated. (shrink)

Are corporations and other complex groups ever morally responsible in ways that do not reduce to the moral responsibility of their members? Christian List, Phillip Pettit, Kendy Hess, and David Copp have recently defended the idea that they can be. For them, complex groups (sometimes called collectives) can be irreducibly morally responsible because they satisfy the conditions for morally responsible agency; and this view is made more plausible by the claim (made by Theiner) that collectives can have minds. In this (...) paper I give a new argument against the idea that collectives can be irreducibly morally responsible in the ways that individuals can be. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind (what Uriah Kriegel calls "the phenomenal intentionality research program") and moral theory (David Shoemaker's tripartite theory of moral responsibility), I argue that for something to have a mind, it must be phenomenally conscious, and that the fact that collectives lack phenomenal consciousness implies that they are incapable of accountability, an important form of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are often portrayed as unwarranted beliefs, typically supported by suspicious kinds of evidence. Yet contemporary work in Philosophy argues provisional belief in conspiracy theories is at the very least understandable---because conspiracies occur---and that if we take an evidential approach, judging individual conspiracy theories on their particular merits, belief in such theories turns out to be warranted in a range of cases. -/- Drawing on this work, I examine the kinds of evidence typically associated with conspiracy theories, and show (...) how the so-called evidential problems with conspiracy theories are also problems for the kinds of evidence put forward in support of other theories. As such, if there is a problem with the conspiracy theorist's use of evidence, it is one of principle: is the principle which guides the conspiracy theorist's use of evidence somehow in error? I argue that whatever we might think about conspiracy theories generally, there is no prima facie case for a scepticism of conspiracy theories based purely on their use of evidence. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has focused almost exclusively on propositional knowledge. This paper considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons: if propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject's attitude to a (true) proposition, the account developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject's attitude to another (existing) subject. This kind of knowledge is distinct from propositional knowledge, but it exhibits a gradability characteristic of context-sensitivity, and admits of shifty thresholds. (...) It is supported by a wide range of unexplored linguistic data and intuitive cases; and it promises to illuminate debates within epistemology, philosophy of religion, and ethics. (shrink)