This paper is about the so-called meta-grounding question, i.e. the question of what grounds grounding facts of the sort ‘φ is grounded in Γ ’. An answer to this question is pressing since some plausible assumptions about grounding and fundamentality entail that grounding facts must be grounded. There are three different accounts on the market which each answer the meta-grounding question differently: Bennett’s and deRosset’s “Straight Forward Account” (SFA), Litland’s “Zero-Grounding Account” (ZGA), and “Grounding Essentialism” (GE). I argue that if (...) grounding is to be regarded as metaphysical explanation (i.e. if unionism is true), (GE) is to be preferred over (ZGA) and (SFA) as only (GE) is compatible with a crucial consequence of the thought that grounding is metaphysical explanation. In this manner the paper contributes not only to discussions about the ground of ground but also to the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between ground, essence, and explanation. (shrink)

This paper will aim to accomplish two things to show Luhmann’s and Hegel’s support of language and communication as dependent on culture, but also their differences with respect to how culture is formed in conjunction with the environment. This paper will firstly show how Hegel distinguishes between the imagination and reason in a different manner from Luhmann, as Hegel considers them logically connected while Luhmann considers them as coextensive. Secondly, this paper will show how reason and imagination create culture through (...) the environment via dialectical idealism in Hegel and a poly-contextural constructivist approach in Luhmann. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kant’s concept of ‘respect’ for the moral law has roots in Adam Smith’s concept of ‘regard’ for the general rules of conduct, which was translated as Achtung in the first German translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. After illustrating that Kant’s technical understanding of respect appeared relatively late in his intellectual development, I argue that Kant’s concept of respect and Smith’s concept of regard share a basic similarity: they are both a single complex phenomenon with (...) two core aspects, namely an attitude and a feeling. I then suggest that the concept of regard offered Kant a way to deal a problem concerning moral motivation that he was trying to solve at the time he likely first read Smith. I conclude by drawing some implications from the account I have offered for our understanding of Kant’s relation to Smith more generally. (shrink)

Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch (...) calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism. (shrink)

In this chapter I offer an account of the nature, scope, and significance of Wolff’s claim that human beings have a duty to cognize moral good and evil. I illustrate that Wolff conceives of this duty as requiring that human beings both acquire distinct cognition of good and evil as well as avoid ignorance and error. Although Wolff intends for the duty to be quite demanding, he restricts its scope by, among other things, claiming it primarily concerns those who have (...) the skills, circumstances, and opportunity to acquire such cognition. Wolff calls these individuals the ‘inventors’ of the truths of morality and he considers himself to be such an inventor. I argue that part of the significance of this duty lies in the fact that Wolff conceives of himself as living up to it by writing the German Ethics, thereby sharing the knowledge he has ‘invented’ with others. (shrink)

In this paper I critically engage with Pauline Kleingeld’s ‘volitional self-contradiction’ interpretation of Kant’s formula of universal law. I make three remarks: first, I seek to clarify what it means for a contradiction to be volitional as opposed to logical; second, I suggest that her interpretation might need to be closer to Korsgaard’s ‘practical contradiction’ interpretation than she thinks; and third, I suggest that more work needs to be done to explain how a volitional self-contradiction generates both a ‘contradiction in (...) conception’ and a ‘contradiction in will.’. (shrink)

Voor het eerst hebben jongeren onder de achttien in Duitsland en België deze maand gestemd, bij de Europese verkiezingen. Nederlandse leeftijdsgenoten hebben dit recht (nog) niet. Te beïnvloedbaar, ze kunnen nog niet verantwoord stemmen, klinkt het. Deze tegenwerpingen zijn oneerlijk. Ze gelden ook voor miljoenen anderen die al wel stemrecht hebben.

We seem to be able to acquire evaluative knowledge by mere reflection, or “from the armchair.” But how? This question is especially pressing for proponents of sentimental perceptualism, which is the view that our evaluative knowledge is rooted in affective experiences in much the way that everyday empirical knowledge is rooted in perception. While such empirical knowledge seems partially explained by causal relations between perceptions and properties in the world, in armchair evaluative inquiry, the relevant evaluative properties are typically not (...) even present. The paper shows how sentimental perceptualists can ultimately provide a broadly causal explanation of our reflective evaluative knowledge. (shrink)

The standard way to test alternative descriptive theories of moral judgment is by asking subjects to evaluate (amongst others) sacrificial dilemmas, where acting classifies as a utilitarian moral judgment and not acting classifies as a deontological moral judgment. Previous research uncovered many situational factors that alter subject’s moral judgments without affecting which type of action utilitarianism or deontology would recommend. This literature review provides a systematic analysis of the experimental literature on the influence of situational factors on moral judgments in (...) sacrificial dilemmas. It analyses 53 articles in detail and reports mean effect sizes, as well as operationalizations, for 36 situational factors that significantly influence moral judgment. Moreover, the review discusses how the impact of situational factors relates to a dual process theory of moral judgment. It supports the view that utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes and shows that the drivers of deontological judgments depend on valence. (shrink)

According to the evolutionary sceptic, the fact that our cognitive faculties evolved radically undermines their reliability. A number of evolutionary epistemologists have sought to refute this kind of scepticism. This paper accepts the success of these attempts, yet argues that refuting the evolutionary sceptic is not enough to put any particular domain of beliefs – notably scientific beliefs, which include belief in Darwinian evolution – on a firm footing. The paper thus sets out to contribute to this positive justificatory project, (...) underdeveloped in the literature. In contrast to a ‘wholesale’ approach, attempting to secure justification for all of our beliefs on the grounds that our belief-forming mechanisms evolved to track truth, we propose a ‘piecemeal’ approach of assessing the reliability of particular belief-forming mechanisms in particular domains. This stands in contrast to the more familiar attempt to transfer warrant obtained for one domain to another by showing how one is somehow an extension of the other. We offer a naturalist reply to the charge of circularity by appealing to reliabilist work on the problem of induction, notably Peter Lipton's distinction between self-certifying and non-self-certifying inductive arguments. We show how, for scientific beliefs, a non-self-certifying argument might be made for the reliability of our cognitive faculties in that domain. We call this strategy Humean Bootstrapping. (shrink)

During the eighteenth century, German philosophers wrote on a broad range of topics in moral philosophy: from meta-ethical issues such as the nature of obligation, to elaborate systems of normative ethics (often in the form of a doctrine of duties to self, others, and God), to topics in applied ethics such as the permissibility of the death penalty and censorship. Moral philosophy was also intimately related to the modern natural law tradition at the time, as well as to discussions taking (...) place in theology and psychology, to name only a few other disciplines. As a result, it is often hard to isolate eighteenth-century German moral philosophy without addressing a whole host of other philosophical subjects. There are nonetheless certain central topics that were discussed by nearly every major figure of the period and which therefore serve as a window into how German philosophers approached moral philosophy during the eighteenth century. In this chapter I illustrate that one such topic is the principle of morality; namely what philosophers took to be the supreme norm at the foundation of judging actions to be morally good or evil. As we will see, although several figures approached this principle in a broadly similar way by identifying “perfection” as the central concept at work, they differ considerably with respect to important details. Furthermore, certain common threads reveal themselves: philosophers differ not only with respect to the content of the principle, but also with respect to the way in which it can be derived, how particular duties can in turn be derived from the supreme principle, and how the principle can be formulated. I begin by outlining Christian Wolff’s influential principle of perfection (Section 1), followed by a consideration of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s subtle revision of this principle (Section 2) and Christian August Crusius’s theological alternative (Section 3). I then briefly consider the impact that the reception of eighteenth-century British philosophy had on German moral philosophy during the second half of the eighteenth century (Section 4), before considering Moses Mendelssohn’s and Immanuel Kant’s answers to the 1763 Prize Essay Question (Section 5) and Johann August Eberhard’s unique mixture of rationalism and empiricism from the early 1780s (Section 6). I conclude (Section 7) with a brief discussion of Kant’s approach to the principle of morality and the principle of happiness proposed against it by his early empiricist critics. (shrink)

Kant claims that love ‘is a matter of feeling,’ which has led many of his interpreters to argue that he conceives of love as solely a matter of feeling, that is, as a purely pathological state. In this paper I challenge this reading by taking another one of Kant’s claims seriously, namely that all love is either benevolence or complacence and that both are rational. I place Kant’s distinction between benevolence and complacence next to the historical inspiration for it, namely (...) Francis Hutcheson’s very similar distinction, in order to argue that love is rational, for Kant, in that it requires certain rational capacities on the part of the agent. I conclude by illustrating that this has important implications for how we understand Kant’s conception of love more generally. (shrink)

This paper defends Flatland—the view that there exist neither determination nor dependence relations, and that everything is therefore fundamental—from the objection from explanatory inefficacy. According to that objection, Flatland is unattractive because it is unable to explain either the appearance as of there being determination relations, or the appearance as of there being dependence relations. We show how the Flatlander can meet the first challenge by offering four strategies—reducing, eliminating, untangling and omnizing—which, jointly, explain the appearance as of there being (...) determination relations where no such relations obtain. Since, plausibly, dependence relations just are asymmetric determination relations, we argue that once we come mistakenly to believe that there exist determination relations, the existence of other asymmetries (conceptual and temporal) explains why it appears that there are dependence relations. (shrink)

The fact of evolution raises important questions for the position of moral realism, because the origin of our moral dispositions in a contingent evolutionary process is on the face of it incompatible with the view that our moral beliefs track independent moral truths. Moreover, this meta-ethical worry seems to undermine the normative justification of our moral norms and beliefs. If we don’t have any grounds to believe that the source of our moral beliefs has any ontological authority, how can our (...) moral judgments be justified in an objective way? In this chapter, I argue that while traditional moral realism is untenable in the light of evolution, normative justification should not be handed the same fate. It is precisely in the fact that moral norms and beliefs are grounded in evolved, innate and therefore universally shared intuitions that those norms and beliefs can be objective-for-us. Such an internalist justification allows us to differentiate moral right from wrong, not because some feature of the external world forces us to acknowledge this, but because our moral nature forces us to project this moral judgment on the world. What’s more, guided by this innate moral compass we can both assess and realize moral progress. (shrink)

This chapter situates Kant’s rejection of Stoic eudaimonism within his overarching anti-eudaimonist agenda. I begin by emphasizing the importance of the Stoic tradition for Kant’s critical reception of ancient ethical theory. I then reconstruct the central commitments of ancient Stoic eudaimonism and of Christian Garve’s quasi-Stoic eudaimonism. Turning to Kant’s anti-Stoic argument in the Dialectic of the Second Critique, I argue that the primary target of Kant’s error of subreption (vitium subreptionis) is the Stoic Seneca, specifically his account of joy (...) (gaudium) as an accompaniment of one’s consciousness of virtuous activity. After reconstructing Kant’s argument in detail, I offer a new way to understand its anti-eudaimonist implications: practical illusion leads the Stoic to rationalize, and, ultimately, to disfigure the moral law. Even in their moral ardor—or rather, propelled by it—the Stoic commits an error of self-love. (shrink)

The debate about scientific realism is concerned with the relation between our scientific theories and the world. Scientific realists argue that our best theories or components of those theories correspond to the world. Anti-realists deny such a correspondence. Traditionally, this central issue in the philosophy of science has been approached by focusing on the theories themselves (e.g., by looking at theory change or the underlying experimental context). I propose a relatively unexplored way to approach this old debate. In addition to (...) focusing on the theory, we should focus on the theorizer. More precisely, in order to determine on which component of a theory we should hinge a realist commitment, we should analyze the cognitive processes underlying scientific theorizing. In this paper I do just that. Drawing from recent developments in the cognitive sciences and evolutionary epistemology, I formulate some tentative conclusions. The aim of this paper is not so much to defend a particular position in the debate on scientific realism but to showcase the value of taking a cognitive perspective in the debate. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from developmental psychology and anthropology points out that the human mind is predisposed to conceptualize the world in particular, species-specific ways. These cognitive predispositions lead to universal human commonsense views, often referred to as folk theories. Nevertheless, humans can transgress these views – i.e. they can contradict them with alternative descriptions, they perceive as more accurate – as exemplified in modern sciences. In this paper, I enquire about the cognitive faculties underlying such transgressions. I claim that there are (...) three faculties enabling us to part with these universal commonsense views of the world imposed by our nature. The first is our ability to represent representations – i.e. to form metarepresentations. The second is our ability to produce alternative representations both by explaining a familiar subject matter in terms of the principles governing different conceptual domains than the one that we are predisposed to apply to the subject matter and by directing our mind to new subject matters (for which we have no predisposed conceptual grasp), understanding them in terms of familiar domains. The third, finally, is our ability to give these representations an epistemic orientation. Key words: Human cognition, Domain-specific knowledge systems, Cognitive predispositions, Folk theories, Cognitive flexibility, Human – nonhuman distinction. (shrink)

In recent work, Atran, Henrich, Norenzayan and colleagues developed an account of religion that reconciles insights from the ‘by-product’ accounts and the adaptive accounts. According to their synthesis, the process of cultural group selection driven by group competition has recruited our proclivity to adopt and spread religious beliefs and engage in religious practices to increase within group solidarity, harmony and cooperation. While their account has much merit, I believe it only tells us half the story of how institutional religions have (...) evolved. Their cultural evolutionary account of religion only looks at the cultural dynamics arising from competition between groups, not at the dynamics arising from within the group. Drawing from game-theoretic analyses of the emergence and cultural evolution of social institutions, I outline two sets of important ‘within-group’ dynamics that shape institutional religions. The first follow from the necessity to keep the interaction of the participants in an equilibrium state in order to maintain the social institution. The second arise from the competition of institutional features for traction within the group. Bringing these dynamics into account enables us to explain prominent features of institutional religions that cannot be satisfactorily explained by the current model of the cultural evolution of religions. (shrink)

At Sophist 260e3-261a2, the Eleatic Stranger claims that in order to demonstrate that falsehood is, he and Theaetetus must first track down what speech (logos), opinion (doxa), and appearance (phantasia) are, and then observe the communion (koinōnia) that speech, opinion, and appearance have with non-being. The Stranger, however, never explicitly discusses the communion of speech, opinion, and appearance with non-being. Yet presumably their communion is implicit in his account of falsehood, given his claim that observing that communion is needed in (...) order to demonstrate that falsehood is (260e5-a2). This essay seeks to make the communion that speech has with non-being explicit. I argue that speech has communion with non-being in that the things and actions speech combines together by means of nouns and verbs need not be combined in a way that reveals how the being a given speech is about combines ontologically with other beings. (shrink)

Universal social institutions, such as marriage, commons management and property, have emerged independently in radically different cultures. This requires explanation. As Boyer and Petersen point out ‘in a purely localist framework would have to constitute massively improbable coincidences’ . According to Boyer and Petersen, those institutions emerged naturally out of genetically wired behavioural dispositions, such as marriage out of mating strategies and borders out of territorial behaviour. While I agree with Boyer and Petersen that ‘unnatural’ institutions cannot thrive, this one-sided (...) explanation of universal social institutions in terms of genetic human nature is unsatisfactory. Drawing on the literature on multi-level selection and gene-culture coevolution, I argue that universal social institutions are first and foremost the products of cultural selection. They occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of cultural possibilities, much in the same way that biological adaptations occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of biological possibilities. To show this, I use game-theory. By modelling the domains of social interaction in which marriage, commons management, and property emerged as Prisoner’s dilemma situations, it becomes clear how an institutional framework allows the group to move to an interactive equilibrium with a larger payoff. Institutions do so by incentivising all parties to adopt a cooperative strategy. They are culturally selected ways of optimising genetically constrained domains of human social interaction. (shrink)

Reasoning from a naturalistic perspective, viewing the mind as an evolved biological organ with a particular structure and function, a number of influential philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that science is constrained by human nature. How exactly our genetic constitution constrains scientific representations of the world remains unclear. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it often leads to the unwarranted conclusion that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects or properties of the world. Secondly, it stands in the way (...) of a nuanced account of the relationship between our cognitive and perceptual wiring and scientific theory. In response, I propose a typology or classification of the different kinds of biological constraints and their sources on science. Using Boden’s notion of a conceptual space, I distinguish between constraints relating to the ease with which we can reach representations within our conceptual space and constraints causing possible representations to fall outside of our conceptual space. This last kind of constraints does not entail that some aspects or properties of the world cannot be represented by us – as argued by advocates of ‘cognitive closure’ – merely that some ways of representing the world are inaccessible to us. It relates to what Clark and Rescher have framed as ‘the alien scientist hypothesis’. The purpose of this typology is to provide some much needed clarity and structure to the debate about biological constraints on science. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, we are “cognitively closed” to the answers to certain problems. McGinn has taken the next step and offered a list of examples: the mind/body problem, the problem of the self and the problem of free will. There are naturalistic, scientific answers to these problems, he argues, but we cannot reach them because of our cognitive limitations. In this paper, we take issue with McGinn's thesis as the most well-developed and systematic one among the so-called “new mysterians”. (...) McGinn aims to establish a strong, representational notion of cognitive closure: a principled inaccessibility of a true theory of certain properties of the world, but he offers arguments that only bear on difficulties with psychologically grasping the correct answers. The latter we label psychological closure. We argue that representational closure does not follow from psychological closure, and that McGinn's case therefore falters. We could very well be able to represent the correct answer to some question, even without being able to grasp that answer psychologically. McGinn's mistake in deriving representational closure from psychological closure rests on a fallacy of equivocation relating to the concept of ‘understanding’. By making this distinction explicit, we hope to improve our thinking about the limits of science in particular and human knowledge in general. (shrink)

What is the relation between joint attention and common knowledge? On the one hand, the relation seems tight: the easiest and most reliable way of knowing something in common with another is for you and that other to be attentively aware of what you are together experiencing. On the other hand, they couldn’t seem further apart: joint attention is a mere perceptual phenomena that infants are capable of engaging in from nine months of age, whereas common knowledge is a cognitive (...) phenomenon involving (so it seems) complex, overlapping metarepresentational states that require the kind of sophisticated mindreading skills that developmental psychology has shown to be beyond the capabilities of young children. In 'The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Shared Social Space', Axel Seemann attempts, inter alia, to makensense of this conundrum. (shrink)

How children seek knowledge and evaluate claims may depend on their understanding of the source of knowledge. What shifts in their understandings about why scientists might disagree and how claims about the state of the world are justified? Until about the age of 41/2, knowledge is seen as self-evident. Children believe that knowledge of reality comes directly through our senses and what others tell us. They appeal to these external sources in order to know. The attainment of Theory of Mind (...) (ToM) at this age is commonly seen as the significant shift in development in understanding disagreements in knowledge claims. Children attaining ToM understand that someone exposed to incorrect or incomplete information might have false beliefs. Disagreement, then, is still attributed to objective sources of knowledge. The current study examines the later developing Interpretive Theory of Mind (iToM) as the basis for children’s understanding of how people with access to the same information might disagree and what this means for how to provide justification for a knowledge claim. Fourteen 2nd graders with the most iToM responses to four tasks and 14 with the fewest iToM responses were selected from a larger sample of 91. In analyses of interviews about a story in which two experts make different claims about a scientific phenomenon, those in the high iToM group noted subjective perspective and processes as the source of disagreement and suggested the need for investigation as the means to knowing. In contrast, those in the low iToM group mostly could not explain the source of disagreement and held that knowledge is acquired from external sources. A comparison of the interviews regarding the science story 2 years later allows for a qualitative description of the development. Those in the low iToM group showed more general recognition of subjective and constructive processes in knowing whereas those in the high iToM group identified interpretive processes and the relativity of perspectives with implications for how observations were conducted and interpreted. Only those in the high iToM group referred to the importance of evidence as a basis for knowledge claims at either point in the study. (shrink)

The learning process of both students and teachers can be predicted based on the learning mode. Therefore, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools must start using online learning and abandon more traditional teaching techniques. Thus, this study investigates the relationship between self-efficacy and academic resilience among 150 senior high school students. Thus, the researchers employed General Self-Efficacy and Resilience Scale. Finally, the statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.78 indicates a high positive correlation between the variables. The p-value (...) of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between self-efficacy and resilience among senior high school students. (shrink)

Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are aligned, not competition problems in which (...) individual interests compete with group interests. In response, I set out to build on those theories and provide a comprehensive naturalistic account of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. My central claim is that social contracts have culturally evolved to solve cooperation problems, which include both coordination and competition problems. I argue that solutions to coordination problems emerge from “within-group” dynamics, while solutions to competition problems result largely from “between-group” dynamics. (shrink)

This paper discusses the rationale for, and efforts to quantify the success of, philosophy outreach efforts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a focus on the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB). We explore the program's democratic foundations and its potential to promote civic and intellectual virtues. After describing pioneering efforts to empirically access the impact of NHSEB, we offer recommendations to empower publicly and empirically-engaged philosophers to conduct further studies in the future.

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

As Socrates recounts his search for causes (aitiai) in the Phaedo, he identifies the following as genuine causes: intelligence (nous), seeming best, choice of the best, and the forms. I argue that these causes should be understood as norms prescribing the conditions their effects must meet if those effects are to be produced. Thus, my account both explains what Socrates’ causes are and the way in which they cause what they cause.

In this paper, I develop a neglected aspect of the value of hope in Kant’s philosophy. I do so by homing in on Section III of the 1793 essay “On the Common Saying.” In my interpretation, Kant argues that if one recognizes obligations to help future generations while also encountering people who violate these obligations, one is more likely to isolate oneself from society—what Kant calls the hatred of humanity or misanthropy. Thus, the paper argues that hope is valuable for (...) combating misanthropy, especially in the pursuit of intergenerational moral goals. (shrink)

Vaidya & Wallner [2021] have recently formulated the Problem of Modal Epistemic Friction (PMEF) for three of the most discussed accounts in the epistemology of modality: conceivability-based, counterfactual-based and deduction-based accounts. They propose essentialist solutions in all three cases, arguing that all three discussed accounts should be supplemented by a suitable epistemology of essence. In this paper I argue that the PMEF also applies to Roca-Royes’ similarity-based account in the epistemology of modality. I also discuss if or to what extent (...) the version of the PMEF that applies to Roca-Royes can be given an essentialist solution. With regard to this question, I argue that besides the inductivist variant of the similarity-based account that Roca-Royes favors, there might also be an essentialist variant that would be successful in at least some cases. As for Roca-Royes’ inductivist variant I argue that the PMEF ultimately boils down to the notorious Problem of Induction. I shall discuss a popular solution to the Problem of Induction and the role essences might play in it. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a defence of cosmopolitanism from a liberal perspective, examining its moral underpinnings, including moral obligations predicated on a belief in common humanity and the fundamental dignity of human people, cultural capacities that include an embrace of pluralism and a fallibilist disposition, and pragmatist resolve in finding humanitarian solutions to real problems that people face. We also scrutinise the ideal of cosmopolitanism by considering the ‘deeply religious’ as the sort of people about whom it may be (...) said that irreconcilable tensions exist between certain types of commitment and/or belonging and what the demands of cosmopolitanism involve. (shrink)

Could the concept of 'evil' apply to AI? Drawing on PF Strawson's framework of reactive attitudes, this paper argues that we can understand evil as involving agents who are neither fully inside nor fully outside our moral practices. It involves agents whose abilities and capacities are enough to make them morally responsible for their actions, but whose behaviour is far enough outside of the norms of our moral practices to be labelled 'evil'. Understood as such, the paper argues that, when (...) it comes to AI and evil, we have more to fear from semi-autonomous, hybrid agents: agents who have enough of a capacity to operate within a minimal form of human practices of participation and responsibility, yet remain partially outside of it, capable of acting from outside the parameters of ordinary interactions in certain circumstances, perhaps sometimes for reasons unknown. (shrink)

The ‘black box’ in Stoic axiology refers to the mysterious connection between the input of Stoic deliberation (reasons generated by the value of indifferents) and the output (appropriate actions). In this paper, I peer into the black box by drawing an analogy between Stoic and Kantian axiology. The value and disvalue of indifferents is intrinsic, but conditional. An extrinsic condition on the value of a token indifferent is that one's selection of that indifferent is sanctioned by context-relative ethical principles. The (...) value of an indifferent that does not meet this condition is normatively silenced, such that it fails to constitute a reason for action. (shrink)

Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism —only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms or when one can expect the favor to be returned. Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human altruism (...) evolved through group selection in which groups of altruists were naturally selected because they had a comparative advantage over other groups. Wilson and Sober’s hypothesis attracted followers but is rejected by most of their peers. The heated debate between advocates and critics of group selection often suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In response, I set out to clearly distinguish ‘genetic’ from ‘cultural’ group selection and argue that the latter does not face the potentially debilitating problems plaguing the former. I defend the claim that human altruistic dispositions evolved through cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution and offer empirical evidence in support. I also argue that actual altruistic behavior often goes beyond the kind of behavior humans have evolved to display. Conscious and voluntary reasoning processes, I show, have an important role in altruistic behavior. This is often overlooked in the scientific literature on human altruism. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate (...) Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

Nanotechnology (henceforth NT) is a rapidly advancing field with the potential of revolutionizing diverse areas such as electronics, healthcare, transport and energy production. NT products and applications come with (potential) benefits and (potential) harms. The presence of potential harms calls for regulation. Both under- and overregulation – I argue – are morally undesirable. In the case of underregulation, stakeholders fall victim to the harmful effects of the technology. In the case of overregulation, stakeholders are deprived of the benefits of the (...) technology. In this chapter, I identify the biases and factors that lead to under- and overregulation and offer solutions in response. More precisely, I argue that a lack of specific regulation, the presence of conflicts of interest and short-term economic incentives could lead to the underregulation of NT products and applications. Conversely, I argue that a negativity bias, harm aversion, the fear of opening ‘Pandora’s box’ and the intuition that what is natural is good and what is artificial (human-made) is bad could lead to overregulation. To avoid these pitfalls and the woes of under- and overregulation following in their wake, we need to set up a process – which I describe – in which policymakers and independent scientists closely collaborate. (shrink)

Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is interesting but peculiar and can seem implausible. He denies that we can know by introspection that we have thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But he allows that we can know by introspection what we think, feel, and experience. We consider two puzzles. The first puzzle, PUZZLE 1, is interpretive. Is there a way of understanding Dretske’s theory on which the knowledge affirmed by its positive side is different than the knowledge denied by its negative side? The (...) second puzzle, PUZZLE 2, is substantive. Each of the following theses has some prima facie plausibility: there is introspective knowledge of thoughts, knowledge requires evidence, and there are no experiences of thoughts. It is unclear, though, that these claims form a consistent set. These puzzles are not unrelated. Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is a potential solution to PUZZLE 2 in that Dretske’s theory is meant to show how,, and can all be true. We provide a solution to PUZZLE 1 by appeal to Dretske’s early work in the philosophy of language on contrastive focus. We then distinguish between “Closure” and “Transmissibility”, and raise and answer a worry to the effect that Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge runs counter to Transmissibility. These results help to secure Dretske’s theory as a viable solution to PUZZLE 2. (shrink)

Although epistasis is at the center of the Fisher-Wright debate, biologists not involved in the controversy are often unaware that there are actually two different formal definitions of epistasis. We compare concepts of genetic independence in the two theoretical traditions of evolutionary genetics, population genetics and quantitative genetics, and show how independence of gene action (represented by the multiplicative model of population genetics) can be different from the absence of gene interaction (represented by the linear additive model of quantitative genetics). (...) The two formulations converge with weak selection but not with strong selection or, for multiple loci, when the aggregated interaction terms are not negligible. As a result of the different formulations of gene interaction, the presence or absence of linkage disequilibrium,/D/, does not necessarily indicate the presence or absence of fitness epistasis. Indeed, linkage disequilibrium is generated in ‘additive’ models in quantitative genetics whenever two (or more) loci experience simultaneous selection. As a research strategy, it is often practical, for theoretical or experimental reasons, to minimize gene interaction by assuming independence of gene action in regard to fitness, or by assuming linear additive effects of multiple loci on a phenotype. However, minimizing the role of epistasis in theoretical investigations hinders our understanding of the origins of diversity and the evolution of complex phenotypes. (shrink)

From the premise that our biology imposes cognitive constraints on our epistemic activities, a series of prominent authors – most notably Fodor, Chomsky and McGinn – have argued that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects and properties of the world. Cognitive constraints, they argue, entail cognitive closure. I argue that this is not the case. More precisely, I detect two unwarranted conflations at the core of arguments deriving closure from constraints. The first is a conflation of what I will (...) refer to as ‘representation’ and ‘object of representation’. The second confuses the cognitive scope of the assisted mind for that of the unassisted mind. Cognitive closure, I conclude, cannot be established from pointing out the (uncontroversial) existence of cognitive constraints. (shrink)

In an important article published in this journal, Dryzek, Bächtiger and Milewicz (2011) champion the convocation of a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly (DGCA). In this article, I aim to further strengthen the case for a DGCA by addressing: (i) why a DGCA is likely to take a long-term perspective in the global interest and (ii) why it is so vital that a global institution should do so. I start by analyzing the nature of the issues requiring global policy. These issues, (...) I will argue, are typically global cooperation problems. Cooperation problems pose two major challenges. The first is to prevent freeriding – i.e. serving one’s short-term interests at the expense of the long-term global interest. The second is to align on an efficient global policy. In both respects, I will argue, a DGCA is a good candidate to yield desirable results (and is likely to do better than current supranational institutions). (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe is well-known for her insistence that there are absolutely prohibited actions, though she is somewhat obscure about why this is so. Nonetheless, I contend in this paper that Anscombe is more concerned with the epistemology of absolute prohibitions, and that her thought on connatural moral knowledge - which resembles moral intuition - is key to understanding her thought on moral prohibitions. I shall identify key features of Anscombe's moral epistemology before turning to investigate its sources, examining the roots (...) of connaturality in Aquinas and comparing it with rationalist ethical intuitionism, which Anscombe differs from in rejecting "good" as a simple, non-natural property. I then develop a two-stage argument about absolute prohibition: The first will be loosely Thomistic, while the second will suggest how Anscombe's absolute prohibitions can be seen as a continuation of Wittgenstein's anti-scepticism in On Certainty. I develop an account of absolute prohibitions as a form of Wittgensteinian hinge proposition - they are not the conclusions of deductive arguments, but the foundations for intelligibility in action. (shrink)

Nanomedicine applications are an extension of traditional pharmaceutical drug development that are targeting the most pressing health concerns through improvements to diagnostics, drug delivery systems, therapeutics, equipment, surgery and prosthetics. The benefits and risks to the individual have been extrapolated to include broader societal impacts of nanomedicine with concerns extending to inequitable distribution of benefits accruing to developed, or North countries, rather than developing, or South countries. Analysis reveals a great deal of overlap between the North and South's most serious (...) health priorities which kill millions each year. A significant amount of nanomedicine research activity is also underway for the most pressing South country-specific health concerns. Nanomedicine development promises profound breakthroughs for both North and South countries; however, the existing inequities in pharmaceutical drug development, patenting, access and delivery remain significant barriers for South countries. (shrink)