A response to a declaration in 'Le Monde', 'Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot' by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on June the 6th, 2016.

In this article, we investigate how the concept of Care Biography and related concepts are understood and operationalised and describe how it can be applied to advancing our understanding and practice of holistic and person‐centred care. Walker and Avant's eight‐step concept analysis method was conducted involving multiple database searches, with potential or actual applications of Care Biography identified based on multiple discussions among all authors. Our findings demonstrate Care Biography to be a novel overarching concept derived from the conjunction of (...) multiple other concepts and applicable across multiple care settings. Concepts related to Care Biography exist but were more narrowly defined and mainly applied in intensive care, aged care, and palliative care settings. They are associated with the themes of Meaningfulness and Existential Coping, Empathy and Understanding, Promoting Positive Relationships, Social and Cultural Contexts, and Self‐Care, which we used to inform and refine our concept analysis of Care Biography. In Conclusion, the concept of Care Biography, can provide a deeper understanding of a person and their care needs, facilitate integrated and personalised care, empower people to be in control of their care throughout their life, and help promote ethical standards of care. (shrink)

A Lockean metaphysics of belief that understands outright belief as a determinable with degrees of confidence as determinates is supposed to effect a unification of traditional coarse-grained epistemology of belief with fine-grained epistemology of confidence. But determination of belief by confidence would not by itself yield the result that norms for confidence carry over to norms for outright belief unless belief and high confidence are token identical. We argue that this token-identity thesis is incompatible with the neglected phenomenon of “mistuned (...) knowledge” – knowledge in the absence of rational confidence. We show how partial epistemological unification can be secured, even without token identity, given determination of outright belief by degrees of confidence. Finally, we suggest a direction for the pursuit of thoroughgoing epistemological unification. (shrink)

A response to Lee Basham's 'The Need for Accountable Witnesses: A Reply to Dentith'.

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, (...) and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for example, (...) consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...) human lives are worse than very long lives wholly devoid of pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, or any other goods, or (2) very short lives containing nothing but suffering are worth living. Since neither result is plausible, we ought to reject the view that life itself is good. On the view I favor, any given life may be worth living because of the goods that it contains, but life itself is neutral. (shrink)

Is consciousness intrinsically valuable? Some theorists favor the positive view, according to which consciousness itself accrues intrinsic value, independent of the particular kind of experience instantiated. In contrast, I favor the neutral view, according to which consciousness is neither intrinsically valuable nor disvaluable. The primary purpose of this paper is to clarify what is at stake when we ask whether consciousness is intrinsically valuable, to carve out the theoretical space, and to evaluate the question rigorously. Along the way, I also (...) show why the neutral view is attractive and why certain arguments for the positive view do not work. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept both of the following claims: (1) consciousness matters morally, and (2) species membership doesn’t matter morally. In other words, many reject speciesism but accept what we might call 'sentientism'. But do the reasons against speciesism yield analogous reasons against sentientism, just as the reasons against racism and sexism are thought to yield analogous reasons against speciesism? This paper argues that speciesism is disanalogous to sentientism (as well as racism and sexism). I make a case for the following (...) asymmetry: (a) some non-humans clearly have interests, but (b) no non-conscious entities clearly have interests. This asymmetry, I argue, renders sentientism resistant to the standard argument against speciesism. (shrink)

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...) the river. The essay argues that the act conditional analysis avoids the problems faced by existing accounts of agentive modality and shows how the act conditional analysis can be extended to an account of generic agentive modal claims. The upshot is a new vantage point on the role of agentive modal ascriptions in practical discourse: ability ascriptions serve as a kind of hypothetical guarantee, and compulsion ascriptions as a kind of nonhypothetical guarantee. (shrink)

Epistemic injustices are wrongs that agents can suffer in their capacity as knowers. In this article, I offer a conceptualisation of a phenomenon I call anticipatory epistemic injustice, which I claim is a distinct and particularly pernicious type of epistemic injustice worthy of independent analysis. I take anticipatory epistemic injustice to consist in the wrongs that agents can suffer as a result of anticipated challenges in their process of taking up testimony-sharing opportunities. I distinguish my account from paradigmatic cases of (...) epistemic injustice, such as Miranda Fricker’s concepts of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice; additionally, I differentiate my view from Kristie Dotson’s account of testimonial smothering. I argue, ultimately, that anticipatory epistemic injustice is a useful addition to our current taxonomy of epistemic injustices, as it has promising explanatory potential for a range of non-standard cases of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

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)

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)

This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral praise or blame solely on the basis of (...) these attributions. Attributionism is presented as rejecting the claim that agents are morally responsible only for what is under their voluntary control, as well as the claim that agents are responsible for wrongdoing only if they could have responded to the moral considerations that spoke against your behavior. These supposed conditions on moral responsibility are rejected for the same reason: agents may reveal features of their selves, in a way that is sufficient for moral responsibility, even in cases in which these conditions are not met. (shrink)

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment and body (...) movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with true components does not extend to these further principles, however, so it is not clear that rejecting the latter should be (...) a consequence of rejecting the former. Instead I consider how one might defuse putative counterexamples to the truth of true-true counterfactuals. (shrink)

Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").

Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well have good reason to avoid (...) engineering. In their recent ‘What is a Conspiracy Theory?’, M. Giulia Napolitano and Kevin Reuter argue that the disagreement between generalists and particularists in the literature on conspiracy theories is best characterized as a set of dueling conceptual engineering projects. While I agree with their turn to this metaphilosophical literature, I give a very different account of its applicability. Particularists, on my account, are better read as aiming to diagnose the ways in which many discussions of the concept of conspiracy theories are a form of conceptual domination, where this broader context should then prompt us to abandon or block any concept of conspiracy theory that treats its referents as inherently defective. Broader metaphilosophical lessons are drawn. (shrink)

Sophist 255c14 distinguishes καθ’ αὑτά and πρὸς ἄλλα (in relation to others). Many commentators identify this with the ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ category distinction. However, terms such as ‘same’ cannot fit into either category. Several reliable manuscripts read πρὸς ἄλληλα (in relation to each other) for πρὸς ἄλλα. I show that πρὸς ἄλληλα is a palaeographically plausible reading which accommodates the problematic terms. I then defend my reading against objections.

Reasons are considerations that figure in sound reasoning. This is considered by many philosophers to be little more than a platitude. I argue that it actually has surprising and far-reaching metanormative implications. The view that reasons are linked to sound reasoning seems platitudinous only because we tend to assume that soundness is a normative property, in which case the view merely relates one normative phenomenon (reasons) to another (soundness). I argue that soundness is also a descriptive phenomenon, one we can (...) pick out with purely descriptive terms, and that the connection between normative reasons and sound reasoning therefore provides the basis for a reductive account of reasons. Like all proposed reductions, this one must confront some version of G. E. Moore’s open question argument. I argue that a reductive view rooted in the idea that reasons figure in sound reasoning is well-equipped to meet the open question challenge head on. (shrink)

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according to (...) our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.*. (shrink)

I present and discuss a counterexample to Kendall Walton's necessary condition for fictionality that arises from considering serial fictions. I argue that although Walton has not in fact provided a necessary condition for fictionality, a more complex version of Walton's condition is immune from the counterexample.

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore’s attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore’s attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre’s account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which (...) focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre’s advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre’s own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre’s work is often taken to imply. (shrink)

Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre-theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts.

Walking through the supermarket, I see the avocados. I know they are avocados. Similarly, if you see a pumpkin on my office desk, you can know it’s a pumpkin from its looks. The phenomenology in such cases is that of “just seeing” that such and such. This phenomenology might suggest that the knowledge gained is immediate. This paper argues, to the contrary, that in these target cases, the knowledge is mediate, depending as it does on one’s knowledge of what the (...) relevant kind of thing looks like. To make the case requires examining the nature of knowing what Fs look like. Is such knowledge to be understood as knowledge of a fact, or rather as a kind of ability? From the conclusion that the knowledge in the target cases is not immediate, the paper concludes that perception does not afford us immediate knowledge concerning objects’ kinds. (shrink)

The discipline of knowledge translation (KT) emerged as a way of systematically understanding and addressing the challenges of applying health and medical research in practice. In light of ongoing and emerging critique of KT from the medical humanities and social sciences disciplines, KT researchers have become increasingly aware of the complexity of the translational process, particularly the significance of culture, tradition and values in how scientific evidence is understood and received, and thus increasingly receptive to pluralistic notions of knowledge. Hence, (...) there is now an emerging view of KT as a highly complex, dynamic, and integrated sociological phenomenon, which neither assumes nor creates knowledge hierarchies and neither prescribes nor privileges scientific evidence. Such a view, however, does not guarantee that scientific evidence will be applied in practice and thus poses a significant dilemma for KT regarding its status as a scientific and practice-oriented discipline, particularly within the current sociopolitical climate. Therefore, in response to the ongoing and emerging critique of KT, we argue that KT must provide scope for relevant scientific evidence to occupy an appropriate position of epistemic primacy in public discourse. Such a view is not intended to uphold the privileged status of science nor affirm the “scientific logos” per se. It is proffered as a counterbalance to powerful social, cultural, political and market forces that are able to challenge scientific evidence and promote disinformation to the detriment of democratic outcomes and the public good. (shrink)

I argue that that an influential strategy for understanding conspiracy theories stands in need of radical revision. According to this approach, called ‘generalism’, conspiracy theories are epistemically defective by their very nature. Generalists are typically opposed by particularists, who argue that conspiracy theories should be judged case-by-case, rather than definitionally indicted. Here I take a novel approach to criticizing generalism. I introduce a distinction between ‘Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’ and ‘Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists’. Generalists uncritically center (...) the latter in their analysis, but I show why the former must be centered by generalists’ own lights: they are the clearest representatives of their views, and they are by far the most harmful. Once we make this change in paradigm cases, however, various typical generalist theses turn out to be false or in need of radical revision. Conspiracy theories are not primarily produced by extremist ideologies, as generalists typically claim, since mainstream, purportedly non-extremist political ideologies turn out to be just as, if not more responsible for such theories. Conspiracy theories are also, we find, not the province of amateurs: they are often created and pushed by individuals widely viewed as experts, who have the backing of our most prestigious intellectual institutions. While generalists may be able to take this novel distinction and shift in paradigm cases on board, this remains to be seen. Subsequent generalist accounts that do absorb this distinction and shift will look radically different from previous incarnations of the view. (shrink)

Constitutivists seek to locate the metaphysical foundations of ethics in nonnormative facts about what is constitutive of agency. For most constitutivists, this involves grounding authoritative norms in the teleological structure of agency. Despite a recent surge in interest, the philosophical move at the heart of this sort of constitutivism remains underdeveloped. Some constitutivists—Foot, Thomson, and Korsgaard (at least in her recent *Self-Constitution*)—adopt a broadly Aristotelian approach. They claim that the functional nature of agency grounds normative judgments about agents in much (...) the same way that the functional natures of artifacts and bodily organs ground normative judgments about those kinds of things. I argue that the neo-Aristotelian conclusions about goodness which follow so straightforwardly from teleological premises are not genuinely normative. Functions are not by their very nature normatively significant. Other constitutivists—notably J. David Velleman and Paul Katsafanas—eschew Aristotelian talk of functions in favor of an approach based on the idea that agency has a constitutive aim. Velleman and Katsafanas both claim that aims are normatively significant. I argue that the fact that agency has a constitutive aim is merely a fact about the motives that produce and regulate actions. And so we are still left with a gap between the teleological and the normative. I conclude by suggesting that constitutivists have failed to find a way to bridge this gap not because none exists, but rather because they have been looking in the wrong place. The constitutivist project can be salvaged, but only if it is supplemented with a reductive metanormative account of reasons for action, an account that links reasons to sound or successful practical reasoning. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine how Dewey circumnavigated debates between empiricists and a priorists by showing that active bodies can perform integrative operations traditionally attributed to “inner” mechanisms, and how he thereby realized developments at which the artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive science communities only later arrived. Some of his ideas about experience being constituted through skills actively deployed in cultural settings were inspired by ancient Greek sources. Thus in some of his more radical moments, Dewey refined rather than invented (...) the wheel, and I suggest that prominent embodiment figures have done the same, Dewey having anticipated them, particularly Noë and his version of enactivism. I urge that cognitive science may progress into relatively unexplored territory by traveling Dewey’s historically sensitive path. (shrink)

The phrase ‘person‐centred care’ (PCC) reminds us that the fundamental philosophical goal of caring for people is to uphold or promote their personhood. However, such an idea has translated into promoting individualist notions of autonomy, empowerment and personal responsibility in the context of consumerism and neoliberalism, which is problematic both conceptually and practically. From a conceptual standpoint, it ignores the fact that humans are social, historical and biographical beings, and instead assumes an essentialist or idealized concept of personhood in which (...) a person is viewed as an individual static object. From a practical standpoint, the application of such a concept of personhood can lead to neglect of a person's fundamental care needs and exacerbate the problems of social inequity, in particular for older people and people with dementia. Therefore, we argue that our understanding of PCC must instead be based on a dynamic concept of personhood that integrates the relevant social, relational, temporal and biographical dimensions. We propose that the correct concept of personhood in PCC is one in which persons are understood as socially embedded, relational and temporally extended subjects rather than merely individual, autonomous, asocial and atemporal objects. We then present a reconceptualization of the fundamental philosophical goal of PCC as promoting selfhood rather than personhood. Such a reconceptualization avoids the problems that beset the concept of personhood and its application in PCC, while also providing a philosophical foundation for the growing body of empirical literature that emphasizes the psychosocial, relational, subjective and biographical dimensions of PCC. (shrink)

I discuss whether "sentience" (i.e., phenomenal consciousness) comes in degrees.

Implicit in much of the recent literature on conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics is the assumption that when speakers argue that we should talk or think about a concept in a specific way, they are doing so as inquirers—as speakers who are invested in arriving at the correct or best view of this concept. In this paper I question that assumption and argue that philosophers have been too quick to project idealized versions of themselves into the contexts of conceptual articulation (...) and conceptual dispute. Speakers often engage in this activity to further interests of theirs that have nothing to do with inquiry, instead carrying out what I call ‘conceptual domination’. Speakers are engaged in conceptual domination when they aim to bring about and enforce widespread uptake for a view of a concept by exploiting institutions and institutional authority. They do so because this view best serves interests that are either irrelevant to or actively interfere with inquiry concerning this concept—paradigmatically their material interests. I consider sources of evidence for assessing whether speakers are engaging in conceptual domination, analyze two case studies, and consider how to push back against conceptual dominators. (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)

This paper draws a distinction between ‘right MacIntyreans’ who are relatively optimistic that MacIntyre’s vision of ethics can be realised in capitalist society, and ‘left MacIntyreans’ who are sceptical about this possibility, and aims to show that the ‘left MacIntyrean’ position is a promising perspective available to business ethicists. It does so by arguing for a distinction between ‘community-focused’ practices and ‘excellence-focused’ practices. The latter concept fulfils the promise of practices to provide us with an understanding of the best work (...) for humankind and highlights the affinities between MacIntyre’s concept of a practice and Marx’s conception of good work as free, creative activity. The paper concludes with a suggestion that we reflect on the best forms of work so that we can strive to ensure the very best activities, those most consonant with our flourishing, one day become available to all. (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)

Doxastic involuntarists, as I categorize them, say that it’s impossible to form a belief as an intentional action. But what exactly is it to form a belief, as opposed to simply getting yourself to have one? This question has been insufficiently addressed, and the lacuna threatens the involuntarists’ position: if the question isn’t answered, their view will lack any clear content; but, after considering some straightforward ways of answering it, I argue that they would make involuntarism either false or insignificant. (...) I also examine several involuntarist arguments, and find them faltering at just this point: inadequate attention to belief-formation results in unsound arguments or insignificant conclusions. The viability of involuntarism as a meaningful position, I conclude, turns on whether the notion of belief-formation can be further developed. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Game theorists tend to model climate negotiations as a so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’. This is rather worrisome, since the conditions under which such commons problems have historically been solved are almost entirely absent in the case of international greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I will argue that the predictive accuracy of the tragedy model might not stem from the model’s inherent match with reality but rather from the model’s ability to make self-fulfilling predictions. I then sketch some possible (...) ways to dispel the tragedy, including (1) recognizing some ways the assumptions of the model fail, (2) taking seriously recent work suggesting that increasing greenhouse gas emissions is not in most nations’ own self-interest, and (3) preferring alternative models like collective risk dilemmas, bargaining games, or cooperative models. (shrink)

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely (...) available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty. (shrink)

Much of the plausibility of epistemic conservatism derives from its prospects of explaining our rationality in holding memory beliefs. In the first two parts of this paper, I argue for the inadequacy of the two standard approaches to the epistemology of memory beliefs, preservationism and evidentialism. In the third, I point out the advantages of the conservative approach and consider how well conservatism survives three of the strongest objections against it. Conservatism does survive, I claim, but only if qualified in (...) certain ways. Appropriately qualified, conservatism is no longer the powerful anti-skeptical tool some have hoped for, but a doctrine closely connected with memory. (shrink)

“A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate,” focuses on the polarized political climate that reflects racial and class differences in the wake of the Trump election. She explores how to see differently about those with whom one disagrees—that is in this specific scenario for Lee, the Trump supporters, including Asian American members of her own family. Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the interstice between the visible and the invisible, if human beings are to see otherwise, we need (...) to disrupt the ready association between the visible and the invisible. Here, she explores the function of affect for the possibility of this break. The phenomenological understanding of emotion does not necessarily empower emotion with any sort of superlative force, especially over reason. But a subject’s emotion chiasmatically reflects the world and vice versa. The caustic and strong emotions felt by people about this presidency reflects the entrenched political climate in our society and chiasmatically the entrenched political climate embroils people in strong emotions that make it difficult to see those with whom we disagree as people we can trust and consider reasonable. To break out of this standoff, to see differently about Trump supporters, one needs to feel differently about them as well. (shrink)

Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify (...) their theoretical commitments and prospects. In his critique of the biogenic approach, Fred Adams uses the presence of intentional states with conceptual content as a criterion to demarcate cognition-driven behaviour from mere sensory response. In this paper I agree with Adams that intentionality is the mark of the cognitive, but simultaneously reject his overly restrictive conception of intentionality. I argue that understanding intentionality simpliciter as the mark of the mental is compatible with endorsing the biogenic approach. I argue that because cognitive science is not exclusively interested in behaviour driven by intentional states with the kind of content Adams demands, the biogenic approach’s status as an approach to cognition is not called into question. I then go on to propose a novel view of intentionality whereby it is seen to exist along a continuum which increases in the degree of representational complexity: how far into the future representational content can be directed and drive anticipatory behaviour. Understanding intentionality as existing along a continuum allows biogenic approaches and anthropogenic approaches to investigate the same overarching capacity of cognition as expressed in its different forms positioned along the continuum of intentionality. Even if all organisms engage in some behaviour that is driven by weak intentional dynamics, this does not suggest that every behaviour of all organisms is so driven. As such, the worry that the biogenic approach is overly permissive can be avoided. (shrink)