Recent philosophical work on sexuality has focused primarily on sexual orientation. Yet, there’s another normatively significant phenomenon in the neighborhood: sexual identity. Here, I develop a cultural theory of queer and straight sexual identity. In particular, I argue that sexual identity is a matter of inclusion/exclusion in relation to queer and straight cultures, which are differentiated in terms of characteristic practices involving kinship and political resistance.

Hope is an attitude with a distinctive epistemological dimension: it is incompatible with knowledge. This chapter examines hope as it relates to knowledge but also to probability and inductive considerations. Such epistemic constraints can make hope either impossible, or, when hope remains possible, they affect how one’s epistemic situation can make hope rational rather than irrational. Such issues are especially relevant to when hopefulness may permissibly figure in practical deliberation over a course of action. So I consider cases of second-order (...) inductive reflection on when one should, or should not, be hopeful for an outcome with which one has a long record of experience: in other words, what is the epistemology behind when one should, if ever, stop hoping for outcomes which have failed one many times in the past? (shrink)

I argue that the Bradley of the 1883 The Principles of Logic marks and separates contents under tension in judgments. The separation comes in attending to content as a device for recuperation of scale. For Bradley that involves scaling material of immediate presentations under limits. As unrealised commitments of so- called real and ideal are an exclusionary condition of singular comprehension, singularity of judgments is mark of singular reflex with privative force; not some singularity in objects taken in episodic correspondence (...) forming distinctively in singular judgment. The distinguishing input, as it were, to judgment forms is via content in some consequential and fact-like limitive facing of the real. I want to approach Bradley in this slightly negative sense as imposing via inversion some sensible restrictions under some conditions of scaling rather than in direct contact with materials to which one stands in some act of obversion, finally. (shrink)

I develop two reasons for thinking that, in most cases, not all conditions for knowing the past by way of episodic memory are met. First, the typical subject who accurately and justifiedly believes what episodic memory delivers is Gettiered, as her justification essentially depends on the falsehood that episodic memory functions like a storehouse. Second, episodic memory misrepresents often. If the subject has evidence of this she typically does not satisfy the justification condition for knowledge of the past from episodic (...) memory. If instead the subject lacks evidence of this misrepresentation, she typically does not satisfy the Gettier condition for knowledge of the past from episodic memory. Either way, episodic memory does not provide the typical subject with knowledge of the past. (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)

This paper is about both an application of virtue ethics, and about virtue ethics itself. A popular application of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics to environmental issues is called interpersonal extensionism. It argues that we should view the normative range of traditional interpersonal virtues, such as compassion and humility, as extending beyond our interactions with people to also include our interactions with non-human environments. This paper uncovers an unaddressed problem for this view, then proposes a solution by revising how we understand neo-Aristotelian (...) virtue ethics itself. The tenet in question, defended by virtue ethicists such as Hursthouse and Foot, claims that a character trait counts as a virtue only if it is strictly necessary for human flourishing. This tenet threatens interpersonal extensionism because, as I show, the extended or environment-regarding aspects of virtues such as compassion and humility are not strictly speaking necessary for human flourishing: people can in principle flourish without those. But I then argue that diversities across both people and environments give us good, seldom acknowledged, reasons to revise neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics so that it no longer imposes the tenet that led to this problem. Neither a trait nor an aspect of it need be necessary for human flourishing in order to count as a neo-Aristotelian virtue. Indeed, marked variation between people and between environments can be complementary with respect to flourishing. Sometimes, for instance, part of the reason an environment-regarding aspect of compassion is virtuous is because of its distinct role in creating conditions that increase the chance that others will flourish. To show these things, I draw from work in philosophy of science on cluster approaches to categories and constitution, and from experiences working with diverse people in Canada's diverse national and provincial parks. (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)

Fifty years have passed since Norwood Russell Hanson's unexpected death, yet he remains an important voice in philosophy of science. This book is a revised and expanded edition of a collection of Hanson's essays originally published in 1971, edited by Stephen Toulmin and Harry Woolf. The new volume features a comprehensive introduction by Matthew Lund (Rowan University) and two new essays. The first is "Observation and Explanation: A Guide to Philosophy of Science", originally published as a posthumous book by (...) Harper and Row. This essay, written near the end of Hanson’s life, represents his mature philosophy of science. The second new addition, Hanson's essay "The Trial of Galileo", is something of a "lost" work – it was only published in a small run collection on famous trials and was left out of the published lists of Hanson’s works. Ever the outspoken firebrand, Hanson found many lessons and warnings from Galileo's trial that were relevant to Cold War America. -/- This volume not only contains Hanson's best-known work in history and philosophy of science, but also highlights the breadth of his philosophical thought. Hanson balanced extreme versatility with a unified approach to conceptual and philosophical problems. Hanson's central insight is that philosophy and science both strive to render the world intelligible -- the various concepts central to our attempts to make sense of the world are interdependent, and cannot operate, or even be fully understood, independently. The essays included in this collection present Hanson's thinking on religious belief, theory, observation, meaning, cosmology, modality, logic, and philosophy of mind. This collection also includes Hanson's lectures on the theory of flight, Hanson's greatest passion. (shrink)

One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit – roughly, as part to whole – with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind is the sort of metaethical expressivism inspired by Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, and defended and worked out in more detail recently (...) by Blackburn, Gibbard, and others. So, my first aim (§1) in this paper is to pose this question about expressivism’s commitments in the theory of meaning and to characterize the answer I think is most natural, given the place expressivist accounts attempt to occupy metaethics. This involves appeal to an ideationalist account of meaning. Unfortunately for the expressivist, however, this answer generates a problem; it’s my second aim (§2) to articulate this problem. Then, my third aim (§3) is to argue that this problem doesn’t extend to the sort of account of the meaning of ethical claims that I favor, which is like expressivism in rejecting a representationalist order of semantic explanation but unlike expressivism in basing an alternative order of semantic explanation on inferential role rather than expressive function. (shrink)

Given the ever-present subject of consciousness wherever consciousness is, it is peculiar that consciousness researchers often mention mental states as if they are conscious independently of being the conscious states of someone [1, p. 132]. We refer to visual perceptions that become conscious, when in reality no one has ever studied mere conscious visual perceptions. What are studied are visual perceptions belonging to conscious human or animal subjects; it is the subjects who are conscious of visual stimuli, not the visual (...) perceptions. I do not know all the reasons why conscious subjects are rarely mentioned in consciousness science, but one could be pragmatic. Explaining the mysterious jump from the nonconscious nuts and bolts of neurons to the aurora borealis of consciousness is a hard problem. But it is an easy problem compared to explaining the emergence of a single conscious subject from the human brain’s 86 billion neurons [cf. 5]. Perhaps it is more practically realistic to solve the less hard problem before attempting to solve the harder hard problem. On the other hand, if we ignore a necessary condition for the presence of consciousness, our explanations of it could be plagued by inadequacy. And how can we explain our whole data set regarding consciousness if we neglect the most fundamental aspect of the data? (shrink)

I explore the logic of the conditional, using credence judgments to argue against Duality and in favor of Conditional Excluded Middle. I then explore how to give a theory of the conditional which validates the latter and not the former, developing a variant on Kratzer (1981)'s restrictor theory, as well as a proposal which combines Stalnaker (1968)'s theory of the conditional with the theory of epistemic modals I develop in Mandelkern 2019a. I argue that the latter approach fits naturally with (...) a conception of conditionals as referential devices which allow us to talk about particular worlds. (shrink)

Pessimists sometimes declare that death makes everything we do pointless or meaningless. In this essay, I consider the motivations for this worry about our collective mortality. I then examine some common responses to this worry that emphasize moderating our standards or changing our goals. Given some limitations of the “moderating our standards” response, I suggest that Viktor Frankl’s view about the permanence of the past offers a different and perhaps better way of responding to the worry that death renders our (...) lives meaningless. After outlining his view, its implications, and the view of time it assumes, I consider and respond to some possible objections to Frankl’s view. If Frankl is right, death cannot make life meaningless or pointless because meaning is attained within life, and when we die our completed lives endure as part of the past. (shrink)

One theoretical charge (of Optimality Theory in its early conception) must have been to retain that sense of qualitative particularity as affecting as constraining theory relevant to a proscribed field when clearly a motivation was to divine in circumscriptions operational consequences conceived on a deferred abstractive level. An attraction of the theory's embodying results of constraint interactions as responsive to theory-internal qualitative implementation, as being in fact supplementarily transparent to co-ordinations of variously language specific implementations, qualitative identifications, was apparent naturalistic (...) coordination of defined features taken here—in OT—at one fell-swoop. Differently put, the uses of analyses of the relevant types of spaces (‘primitive from the viewpoint of linguistic theories’) will (latterly) involve a period of time-stretch or compression over a previously normal (I take it) process of embeddings in a new theorised and recursively enacted invocation/re-invocation of base as digestively present in results of corrected theories. Or as Prince and Smolensky have it -/- 'What we have done, in essence, is to replace the iterative procedure (act/evaluate, act/evaluate, . . . ) with a recursive scheme: collect the results of all possible actions, then sort recursively.' OT, 16. (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)

I discuss what I call practical Moore sentences: sentences like ‘You must close your door, but I don’t know whether you will’, which combine an order together with an avowal of agnosticism about whether the order will be obeyed. I show that practical Moore sentences are generally infelicitous. But this infelicity is surprising: it seems like there should be nothing wrong with giving someone an order while acknowledging that you do not know whether it will obeyed. I suggest that this (...) infelicity points to a striking psychological fact, with potentially broad ramifications concerning the structure of norms of speech acts: namely, when giving an order, we must act as if we believe we will be obeyed. (shrink)

People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative than those in which (...) other people lied to or emotionally harmed them. Furthermore, people judge those actions that happened further in the past to be more morally wrong than those that happened more recently. Finally, for periods of the past when they believed that they were very different people than they are now, participants judge their actions to be more morally wrong and more negative than those actions from periods of their pasts when they believed that they were very similar to who they are now. The authors discuss these findings in relation to theories about the function of autobiographical memory and moral cognition in constructing and perceiving the self over time. (shrink)

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, one that (...) coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

I show that standard dynamic approaches to the semantics of epistemic modals invalidate the classical laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction, as well as the law of epistemic non-contradiction. I argue that these facts pose a serious challenge.

Intellectualists about knowledge how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e, a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by (...) modeling practical modes of thought after Fregean senses. In this paper, I take up her model and the presuppositions it is built upon, arguing that her view of practical thought is not positioned to account for much of what human agents are able to do. (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)

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)

The meaning of definite descriptions (like ‘the King of France’, ‘the girl’, etc.) has been a central topic in philosophy and linguistics for the past century. Indefinites (‘Something is on the floor’, ‘A child sat down’, etc.) have been relatively neglected in philosophy, under the Russellian assumption that they can be unproblematically treated as existential quantifiers. However, an important tradition, drawing from Stoic logic, has pointed to patterns which suggest that indefinites cannot be treated simply as existential quantifiers. The standard (...) dynamic semantic treatment of those phenomena, however, has well-known problems with negation and disjunction. -/- In this paper I develop a new approach to (in)definites. On my theory, truth-conditions are classical. But in addition to truth-conditions, meanings comprise a second dimension of what I call bounds. It is at the level of bounds, not truth-conditions, that I locate the characteristically dynamic coordination between indefinites and definites. The resulting system thus has a classical logic. This approach avoids dynamic semantics’ logical problems, and, more generally, yields a new perspective on the relation between truth-conditional and dynamic effects in natural language. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the thesis that logic is not special. In this paper, I consider, and reject, a challenge to this thesis. According to this challenge, there are basic logical principles, and part of what makes such principles basic is that they are epistemically exceptional. Thus, according to this challenge, the existence of basic logical principles provides reason to reject anti-exceptionalism about logic. I argue that this challenge fails, and that the exceptionalist positions motivated by it are thus unfounded. (...) I make this case by disambiguating two senses of ‘basic’ and showing that, once this disambiguation is taken into account, the best reason we have for thinking that there are basic principles actually implies that those principles do not require a special epistemology. Consequently, the existence of basic logical principles provides reason to accept, rather than reject, anti-exceptionalism concerning the epistemology of logic. I conclude by explaining how an abductivist, anti-exceptionalist approach to the epistemology of logic can accommodate the notion of basic logical principles. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

McGee argued that modus ponens was invalid for the natural language conditional ‘If…then…’. Many subsequent responses have argued that, while McGee’s examples show that modus ponens fails to preserve truth, they do not show that modus ponens fails to preserve rational full acceptance, and thus modus ponens may still be valid in the latter informational sense. I show that when we turn our attention from indicative conditionals to subjunctive conditionals, we find that modus ponens does not preserve either truth or (...) rational full acceptance, and thus is not valid in either sense. In concluding I briefly consider how we can account for these facts. (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)

In this paper I return to the mid-20th-century debate between Quine and Carnap on the status of metaphysics questions with an eye toward advancing contemporary debates about whether naturalists can coherently undertake substantive metaphysical inquiry. Following Huw Price, I take the debate between Quine and Carnap to hinge, in part, on whether human inquiry is functionally unified. However, unlike Price, I suggest that this question is not best understood as a question about the function(s) of descriptive discourse. This goes along (...) with rejecting a “linguistic conception” of the starting point of metaphysical inquiry, which, although shared by Quine and Carnap, Price gives us no good reason to think is mandatory for naturalists. I sketch two reasons naturalists have to reject a particular manifestation of this linguistic conception in Quine’s work—his criterion of ontological commitment. Finally, I show how these reasons can help us identify the grains of truth in some recent critiques of “mainstream metaphysics of mind.”. (shrink)

Everyday (mis)uses of deepfakes define prevailing conceptualizations of what they are and the moral stakes in their deployment. But one complication in understanding deepfakes is that they are not photographic yet nonetheless manipulate lens-based recordings with the intent of mimicking photographs. The harmfulness of deepfakes, moreover, significantly depends on their potential to be mistaken for photographs and on the belief that photographs capture actual events, a tenet known as the transparency thesis, which scholars have somewhat ironically attacked by citing digital (...) imaging techniques as counterexamples. Combining these positions, this paper sets out two core points: (1) that conceptions about the nature of photography introduce imperatives about its uses; and (2) that popular cultural understandings of photography imply normative ideas that infuse our encounters with deepfakes. Within this, I further raise the question of what moral ground deepfakes occupy that allows them to have such a potentially devastating effect. I show that answering this question involves reinstating the notion that photographs are popularly conceived of as transparent. The rejoinder to this argument, however, is that to take the sting out of deepfakes we must, once again, become skeptical of the veracity of all images, including photoreal ones. This kind of critical mindedness was warranted before the invention of photography for both pictorial imprints and written accounts from various media sources. Given this, along with the fact that photographic trickery is nothing new, deepfakes need not push us into a post-truth epistemic abyss, for they imply a decidedly old turn. (shrink)

Typical analyses of belief in conspiracy theories have it that identifying as a conspiracy theorist is irrational. However, given that we know conspiracies occur, and theories about said conspiracies can be warranted, should we really be scared of the locution 'I'm a conspiracy theorist...'?

In this paper I propose a novel defence of political cosmopolitanism grounded in a familiar principle: universal moral equality. Critics of cosmopolitanism generally agree to universal moral equality, but disagree about what moral equality means politically. According to my argument, if we accept that all people are morally equal, then we ought to accept their equal moral standing. We should therefore prefer socio-political arrangements that reflect the equal moral standing of all people over those that reflect differentiated moral standing. A (...) reasonable cosmopolitanism need not preclude partialist attachment to co-nationals, or undermine the significance of self-determination, so long as political arrangements do not produce differentiated moral standing. As the political application of an uncontroversial moral principle, I defend reasonable cosmopolitanism against nationalism and statism. Neither of these, I argue, are suitable foundations for global justice in migration because they each conceive of justice as a local concern for insiders. (shrink)

A part of Stalnaker (1968)’s influential theory of conditionals has been neglected, namely the role for an accessibility relation between worlds. I argue that the accessibility relation does not play the role intended for it in the theory as stated, and propose a minimal revision which solves the problem, and brings the theory in line with the formulation in Stalnaker & Thomason 1970.

In this article, I review textual evidence demonstrating that James and Dewey incorporated Kant’s ideas, even while criticizing him. I specifically argue that the pragmatic evolution of the Kantian a priori carried out by James and Dewey is a transition from the mental to the bodily. I further argue that the parallels between pragmatists and Kant, along with the transition from the mental to bodily, relate to scientific contexts in which all developed their outlooks. Though historically grounded, my ultimate goal (...) is to show that pragmatism and by extension Kantianism mesh with and indeed contribute to cutting edge ideas in fields ranging from neuropathology to robotics and AI to cognitive science, whether in the form of Gibsonian theory or enactivism. (shrink)

We propose a new analysis of ability modals. After briefly criticizing extant approaches, we turn our attention to the venerable but vexed conditional analysis of ability ascriptions. We give an account that builds on the conditional analysis, but avoids its weaknesses by incorporating a layer of quantification over a contextually supplied set of actions.

This article focuses on situations and emotional perception. To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts. However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts. Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolate these results to defend three interconnected points. First, I argue that while perceiving (...) expression is sometimes about reading minds, it is more squarely about perceiving solicitations or closures for action. Second, I frame expressions as a subcategory of Gibson’s affordances. This includes those showing up through context, in turn suggesting Kuleshov-like scenarios are not mere perceptual tricks. Third, I maintain that situations—with or without other human beings—have action-motivating expressive qualities or what Gestalt theorists called physiognomic characters, following Werner. These likewise emerge through ecological relations, and are very much like affordances and in the world as much as them. With resemblance theories, my account agrees that we perceive expression in the world. However, it indicates a broad range of cases in which expression shows up as consequences of overall situations that solicit or close actions, as opposed to mere resemblance between entities and human expressions. (shrink)

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

According to process reliabilism, a belief produced by a reliable belief-forming process is justified. I introduce problems for this theory on any account of reliability. Does the performance of a process in some domain of worlds settle its reliability? The theories that answer “Yes” typically fail to state the temporal parameters of this performance. I argue that any theory paired with any plausible parameters has implausible implications. The theories that answer “No,” I argue, thereby lack essential support and exacerbate familiar (...) problems. There are new reasons to avoid any reliability conditions on justification. (shrink)

This article contemplates symbols and values inscribed on Cairo’s landscape during the 2011 revolution and the period since, focusing on Tahrir Square and the role of the Egyptian flag in street discourses there. I start by briefly pondering how intertwined popular narratives readied the square and flag as emblems of dissent. Next I examine how these appropriations shaped protests in the square, and how military authorities who retook control in 2013 re-coopted the square and flag, with the reabsorption of each (...) critical to that of the other and executed in the same place: Tahrir. Pro-military factions have created the pretense that they were for the revolution by altering the square and structures around it. Furthermore, the square has remained open to the public, but ceased to be inviting. This relates to post-revolutionary alterations that psychologically repel entry. I consider these changes in light of affordance theory, value sensitive design research and especially the defensible space model, arguing that Tahrir Square has been symbolically cordoned and closed. (shrink)

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)

The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is one of the most important in contemporary moral theory. Yet, providing an adequate formal account of it has proven difficult. In this article I defend a new formal account of the distinction, one that avoids various problems faced by other accounts. My account is based on an influential account of the distinction developed by McNaughton and Rawling. I argue that their approach is on the right track but that it succumbs to two serious objections. I then (...) show how to formulate a new account that follows the key insights of McNaughton and Rawling’s approach yet avoids the two objections. (shrink)

Ubuntu originated in small-scale societies in precolonial Africa. It stresses metaphysical and moral interconnectedness of humans, and newer Africapitalist approaches absorb ubuntu ideology, with the aims of promoting community wellbeing and restoring a love of local place that global free trade has eroded. Ecological degradation violates these goals, which ought to translate into care for the nonhuman world, in addition to which some sub-Saharan thought systems promote environmental concern as a value in its own right. The foregoing story is reinforced (...) by field research on African hunting operations that appear—counterintuitively—to reconcile conservation with business imperatives and local community interests. Though acknowledging shortcomings, I maintain these hunting enterprises do, by and large, adopt Africapitalist and ubuntu attitudes to enhance community wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and long-term economic viability. I also examine how well-intentioned Western conservation agendas are neocolonial impositions that impede local control while exacerbating environmental destruction and socioeconomic hardship. Ubuntu offers a conciliatory epistemology, which Africapitalism incorporates, and I conclude by considering how standard moral theories and political divisions become less antagonistic within these sub-Saharan frameworks, so even opponents can find common cause. (shrink)

Amid the many figures who number among the Thomists writing during the early 20th century period of revival in scholastic thought in the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Leo XIII, there is numbered the French convert, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). Over the course of his long lifetime, Maritain authored works covering a host of philosophical and theological topics: epistemology, the philosophy of the sciences and natural philosophy, aesthetics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, (...) the philosophy of history, etc. The details concerning Maritain’s youth and conversion have been ably told by others and can be consulted by the interested reader. Detailed bibliographies of his works are available for those interested in engaging the full breadth of his writing. In this article, I will focus on the particular shape of Maritain’s Thomism and his place in the overall hermeneutics of the Thomistic tradition, in particular the debt that he owes to John Poinsot (1589–1644), to whom he refers as “John of St. Thomas,” in accord with the standard appellations within the Thomistic tradition in which he wrote. Following a general account of Maritain’s “style” of Thomism, I will provide a specific catalogue of some central themes in his thought that bear the clear impress of his engagement with the thought of John of St. Thomas. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article intends to provide the reader with a sufficient appraisal of the main lines of influence exercised upon Maritain’s thought by the Baroque Commentator, without whose philosophical and theological works Maritain’s own labors would be unthinkable. (shrink)

We are all capable of arriving at views that are driven by corrupting non-epistemic interests. But we are nonetheless very skilled at performing a commitment to epistemic goods in such cases. I call this the ‘Problem of Mere Epistemic Performance’, and it generates a need to determine when these commitments are illusory and when they are in fact genuine. I argue that changing one’s mind, when done in response to the evidence and at a likely cost to oneself, are the (...) best indications that an agent is committed to epistemic goods, that they are genuinely in the game of giving and asking for reasons. This is because changing one’s mind in this way goes as far as we can in eliminating the possibility that the agent has an ulterior motivation for their epistemic practices. Moreover, this account shows that the consensus view of the ideal epistemic agent is mistaken. The ideal agent must have false beliefs or deficient epistemic practices because only then do they have the opportunity to change their mind and establish a commitment to epistemic goods – a commitment that even an agent with only true beliefs and maximal justification or understanding may lack. (shrink)

Pragmatism is resurging, especially among embodied cognitive scientists. The growing appreciation of the body accompanying this fits with increasing recognition that cognition and perception are valuative, which is to say, emotional, interested and aesthetic. In what follows, I detail how classical pragmatic thinking—specifically that of William James and John Dewey—anticipates recent valuative theories of mind and how it can be used to develop them further.I begin by discussing James's concept of selective interests, how it meshes with contemporary research and how (...) the two together suggest not only that cognition is valuative, but that emotions bring us rationally into touch with our worlds. Recent advocates cite... (shrink)

Deepfakes are audio, video, or still-image digital artifacts created by the use of artificial intelligence technology, as opposed to traditional means of recording. Because deepfakes can look and sound much like genuine digital recordings, they have entered the popular imagination as sources of serious epistemic problems for us, as we attempt to navigate the increasingly treacherous digital information environment of the internet. In this paper, I attempt to clarify what epistemic problems deepfakes pose and why they pose these problems, by (...) drawing parallels between recordings and our own senses as sources of evidence. I show that deepfakes threaten to undermine the status of digital recordings as evidence. The existence of deepfakes thus encourages a kind of skepticism about digital recordings that bears important similarities to classic philosophical skepticism concerning the senses. However, the skepticism concerning digital recordings that deepfakes motivate is also importantly different from classical skepticism concerning the senses, and I argue that these differences illuminate some possible strategies for solving the epistemic problems posed by deepfakes. (shrink)

In this chapter I focus on two problems facing immigration systems around the world, and Australia in particular. The topics addressed are chosen because each one involves important fundamental rights and because significant improvement in these areas is possible even if each state acts alone, without significant coordination with others. First, I examine refugee programmes, focussing specifically on the ‘two- tier’ refugee programmes pioneered by Australia with the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas by the Howard Government in 1999. Next, I (...) look at recent declines in refugee resettlement schemes from already stingy levels and, in relation to Australia in particular, I show how the tying of resettlement numbers to the number of affirmative asylum claims granted is both wrong- headed and counterproductive. The second area of immigration policy explored is family migration, another area where immigration systems around the world have been moving in the wrong direction, often via less than transparent administrative processes. Australia is no exception. While Australia’s family migration system is reasonably good on its face, in practice there are several factors which make the programme significantly less than satisfactory from the perspective of protecting the basic rights of migrants and, arguably more importantly, citizens. These problems can and should be fixed in straightforward ways, and since doing so would be more just, would have few— if any— significant negative consequences, and in fact would have a number of clear benefits, those changes should be made. (shrink)

I argue that ⌜p or q⌝ can be interpreted as (p ∨ q) ∧ ♢p ∧ ♢q, where ♢ is a possibility modal whose flavor can be epistemic, circumstantial, or deontic. I show that no extant theory can account for this generalization, and argue that the best way to do so is with a direct theory on which ‘or’ means λp.λq.(p∨q)∧♢p∧♢q. I show that the resulting theory also yields an appealing account of both wide- and narrow-scope free choice inferences.

Forgetting is importantly related to remembering, evidence possession, epistemic virtue, personal identity, and a host of highly-researched memory conditions. In this paper I examine the nature of forgetting. I canvass the viable options for forgetting’s ontological category, type of content, characteristic relation to content, and scale. I distinguish several theories of forgetting in the philosophy and psychology of memory literatures, theories that diverge on these options. The best theories from the literature, I claim, fail two critical tests that I develop (...) (the metacognition and prospection tests), underwriting arguments against the theories. I introduce a new theory about the state of forgetting—the learning, access failure, dispositional (LEAD) theory: to forget is to fail to access something that is both learned and either inaccessible or intended to be accessed. I argue that the LEAD theory of forgetting is the lead theory of forgetting. It passes the metacognition and prospection tests, and has several further virtues at no cost. Finally, I advocate reductionism about the process of forgetting; the process reduces wholly to states of forgetting. In particular, a process of forgetting is just a sequence of increasingly strong states of forgetting. (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)

When embedding data are used to argue against semantic theory A and in favor of semantic theory B, it is important to ask whether A could make sense of those data. It is possible to ask that question on a case-by-case basis. But suppose we could show that A can make sense of all the embedding data which B can possibly make sense of. This would, on the one hand, undermine arguments in favor of B over A on the basis (...) of embedding data. And, provided that the converse does not hold—that is, that A can make sense of strictly more embedding data than B can—it would also show that there is a precise sense in which B is more constrained than A, yielding a pro tanto simplicity-based consideration in favor of B. In this paper I develop tools which allow us to make comparisons of this kind, which I call comparisons of potential expressive power. I motivate the development of these tools by way of exploration of the recent debate about epistemic modals. Prominent theories which have been developed in response to embedding data turn out to be strictly less expressive than the standard relational theory, a fact which necessitates a reorientation in how to think about the choice between these theories. (shrink)

A belief is stored if it is in no way before the subject’s mind. The problem of stored beliefs is that of satisfactorily explaining how the stored beliefs which seem justified are indeed justified. In this paper I challenge the two main internalist attempts to solve this problem. Internalism about epistemic justification, at a minimum, states that one’s mental life alone determines what one is justified in believing. First I dispute the attempt from epistemic conservatism, which states that believing justifies (...) retaining belief. Then I defend the attempt from dispositionalism, which assigns a justifying role to dispositions, from some key objections. But by drawing on cognitive psychological research I show that, for internalism, the problem of stored beliefs remains. (shrink)