Nathan Salmon; XII*—How to Measure the Standard Metre, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 193–218.

Review the Istvan Kiraly V.'s book: Death and History.

Some prominent scientists and philosophers have stated openly that moral and political considerations should influence whether we accept or promulgate scientific theories. This widespread view has significantly influenced the development, and public perception, of intelligence research. Theories related to group differences in intelligence are often rejected a priori on explicitly moral grounds. Thus the idea, frequently expressed by commentators on science, that science is “self-correcting”—that hypotheses are simply abandoned when they are undermined by empirical evidence—may not be correct in all (...) contexts. In this paper, documentation spanning from the early 1970s to the present is collected, which reveals the influence of scientists’ moral and political commitments on the study of intelligence. It is suggested that misrepresenting findings in science to achieve desirable social goals will ultimately harm both science and society. (shrink)

Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing is ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognizing this will require us to be more intellectually modest.

This article evaluates an emerging element in popular debate and inquiry: DYOR. (Haven’t heard of the acronym? Then Do Your Own Research.) The slogan is flexible and versatile. It is used frequently on social media platforms about topics from medical science to financial investing to conspiracy theories. Using conceptual and empirical resources drawn from philosophy and psychology, we examine key questions about the slogan’s operation in human cognition and epistemic culture.

K. R. Popper distinguished between two main uses of logic, the demonstrational one, in mathematical proofs, and the derivational one, in the empirical sciences. These two uses are governed by the following methodological constraints: in mathematical proofs one ought to use minimal logical means (logical minimalism), while in the empirical sciences one ought to use the strongest available logic (logical maximalism). In this paper I discuss whether Popper’s critical rationalism is compatible with a revision of logic in the empirical sciences, (...) given the condition of logical maximalism. Apparently, if one ought to use the strongest logic in the empirical sciences, logic would remain immune to criticism and, thus, non-revisable. I will show that critical rationalism is theoretically compatible with a revision of logic in the empirical sciences. However, a question that remains to be clarified by the critical rationalists is what kind of evidence would lead them to revise the system of logic that underlies a physical theory, such as quantum mechanics? Popper’s falsificationist methodology will be compared with the recently advocated extension of the abductive methodology from the empirical sciences to logic by T. Williamson, since both of them arrive at the same conclusion concerning the status of classical logic. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen proposes a criterion of philosophical success. He takes it to support an extremely pessimistic view about philosophy. He thinks that all philosophical arguments for substantive conclusions fail, including the argument from evil. I’m more optimistic on both counts. I’ll identify problems with van Inwagen’s criterion and propose an alternative. I’ll then explore the differing implications of our criteria. On my view, philosophical arguments can succeed and the argument from evil isn’t obviously a failure.

Current discussions of hermeneutical injustice, I argue, poorly characterise the cognitive state of victims by failing to account for the communicative success that victims have when they describe their experience to other similarly situated persons. I argue that victims, especially when they suffer moral wrongs that are yet unnamed, are able (1) to grasp certain salient aspects of the wrong they experience and (2) to cultivate the ability to identify instances of the wrong in virtue of moral emotions. By moral (...) emotions I mean emotions like indignation that reflect an agent’s ethical commitments and bear on her ethical assessments. Further, I argue that victims can impart their partial understanding of the wrong they suffer to others who are not similarly situated by eliciting moral emotions such as pity that are tied to broad notions of justice and fairness. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo mostrar, desde a psicanálise freudiana, um caminho possível que a leva ao encontro da filosofia de orientação fenomenológica. Em O eu e o isso, de 1923, Sigmund Freud emprega uma nova noção pouco explorada na literatura psicanalítica: o eu-corpo. O escopo de nossa análise delimita-se à interpretação e à explicitação da noção de eu-corpo tal como esta foi apresentada por Freud, confrontando-a com a fenomenologia em Merleau-Ponty e Michel Henry. Para tanto, propomos uma análise (...) em quatro tempos. Inicialmente, evidenciaremos o entendimento de Freud sobre o modelo de psicologia originada em Brentano que tem como um de seus desdobramentos a fenomenologia. Depois, mostraremos como a concepção do isso, segundo o próprio texto de Freud, foi determinante para que ele formulasse uma revisão da primeira tópica e a incorporasse em uma segunda tópica. Por fim, nas últimas duas partes, examinaremos o tratamento dado por Merleau-Ponty e Michel Henry à questão do corpo. Concluímos que é possível o encontro entre a psicanálise e a fenomenologia via a noção de eu-corpo freudiano; contudo, tal condução implicará reformulações em teses centrais da psicanálise. (shrink)

With AI permeating our lives, there is widespread concern regarding the proper framework needed to morally assess and regulate it. This has given rise to many attempts to devise ethical guidelines that infuse guidance for both AI development and deployment. Our main concern is that, instead of a genuine ethical interest for AI, we are witnessing moral diplomacies resulting in moral bureaucracies battling for moral supremacy and political domination. After providing a short overview of what we term ‘ethics washing’ in (...) the AI industry, we analyze the 2021 UNESCO Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts (Category II) tasked with drafting the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and show why the term ‘moral diplomacy’ is better suited to explain what is happening in the field of the ethics of AI. Our paper ends with some general considerations regarding the future of the ethics of AI. (shrink)

The Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm says that an event is overall harmful for someone if and only if it makes her worse off than she otherwise would have been. I defend this account from two common objections.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that the empirical knowledge of the world depends on a priori conditions of human sensibility and understanding, i. e., our capacities of sense experience and concept formation. The objective knowledge presupposes, on one hand, space and time as a priori conditions of sensibility and, on another hand, a priori judgments, like the principle of causality, as constitutive conditions of understanding. The problem is that in the XX century the physical science completely changed (...) how we conceive our knowledge of the world. Face to this new situation, what was changed in our classical reason? However, if the transcendental point of view is adopted, in the specific case of quantum mechanics, we have to wonder about the general conditions of this theory that make possible such knowledge, which predictive value is much more accurate than the classical physics. The aim of this work is firstly to show the Kantian implications on Bohr’s interpretation of quantum phenomena and secondly to provide an overview of the key elements for understanding the transcendental locus of ordinary language in the quantum mechanics context, in order to give support to a transcendental pragmatic position in the analysis of science. (shrink)

Due to Gӧdel’s incompleteness results, the categoricity of a sufficiently rich mathematical theory and the semantic completeness of its underlying logic are two mutually exclusive ideals. For first- and second-order logics we obtain one of them with the cost of losing the other. In addition, in both these logics the rules of deduction for their quantifiers are non-categorical. In this paper I examine two recent arguments –Warren (2020), Murzi and Topey (2021)– for the idea that the natural deduction rules for (...) the first-order universal quantifier are categorical, i.e., they uniquely determine its semantic intended meaning. Both of them make use of McGee’s open-endedness requirement and the second one uses in addition Garson’s (2013) local models for defining the validity of these rules. I argue that the success of both these arguments is relative to their semantic or infinitary assumptions, which could be easily discharged if the introduction rule for the universal quantifier is taken to be an infinitary rule, i.e. non-compact. Consequently, I reconsider the use of the ω-rule and I show that the addition of the ω-rule to the standard formalizations of first-order logic is categorical. In addition, I argue that the open-endedness requirement does not make the first-order Peano Arithmetic categorical and I advance an argument for its categoricity based on the inferential conservativity requirement. (shrink)

Our technological lifeworld has become an info-computational media populated by data and algorithms, an artificial environment for life and shared experiences. In this chapter, I tried to sketch three new assumptions for bioethics – it is hardly possible to substantiate ethical guidelines or an idea of normativity in an aprioristic manner; moral status is a function of data entities, not something solely human; agency is plural and thus is shared or sometimes delegated – in order to chart a proposal for (...) a posthuman bioethics. Posthuman is perhaps not the best expression available, but it covers the idea of a shift from a world centered on self-contained and exclusively human agency to a more comprehensive and relational way of thinking. The “posthuman” label should be understood as a rebuttal of biocentrism and anthropocentrism by moving closer to conceptions we encounter in population ethics or in discourse about biosocial and technical systems. Posthuman bioethics is “environmentalist” without losing the humanistic stance. The question regarding how suitable an infocentric bioethics is in practice remains to be settled. The moral principles in bioethics could be reconceived as relying on these new assumptions, in a postindividualistic manner that accepts formal primacy of causal digital artifacts in affording actions in a world of ambient algorithmic intelligence. (shrink)

The categoricity problem for a system of logic reveals an asymmetry between the model-theoretic and the proof-theoretic resources of that logic. In particular, it reveals prima facie that the proof-theoretic instruments are insufficient for matching the envisaged model-theory, when the latter is already available. Among the proposed solutions for solving this problem, some make use of new proof-theoretic instruments, some others introduce new model-theoretic constrains on the proof-systems, while others try to use instruments from both sides. On the proof-theoretical side, (...) two main approaches for solving the categoricity problem for propositional classical logic consist in the enforcement of the formal systems of this logic by introducing rules of inference of a new kind. A multiple-conclusions logic allows rules of inference with more than one conclusion, while a bilateralist system contains rules of inference formulated in terms of assertion and rejection. Both these approaches reveal interesting formal features of logical reasoning. This paper analyses some of the advantages and limitations of these two approaches as solutions for a full formalization of logic, i.e., for a categorical formalization. (shrink)

A review of the volume that brings together K.R. Popper's writings on deductive logic and its foundations. I emphasize Popper's inferentialist position in his earlier articles and Carnap's influence on many of his logical ideas (an interesting letter from Carnap to Popper is also summarised in the review).

Discussions of political obligation and political authority have long focused on the idea that the commands of genuine authorities constitute content-independent reasons. Despite its centrality in these debates, the notion of content-independence is unclear and controversial, with some claiming that it is incoherent, useless, or increasingly irrelevant. I clarify content-independence by focusing on how reasons can depend on features of their source or container. I then solve the long-standing puzzle of whether the fact that laws can constitute content-independent reasons is (...) consistent with the fact that some laws must fail to bind due to their egregiously unjust content. Finally I defend my understanding of content-independence against challenges and show why it retains a place of special importance for questions about the law and political obligation. Content-independence highlights that it is some feature of the law or law-making process in general that is supposed to generate moral obligations for citizens, not the merits of particular laws. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an explosion of philosophical work on blame. Much of this work has focused on explicating the nature of blame or on examining the norms that govern it, and the primary motivation for theorizing about blame seems to derive from blame’s tight connection to responsibility. However, very little philosophical attention has been given to praise and its attendant practices. In this paper, I identify three possible explanations for this lack of attention. My goal is to (...) show that each of these lines of thought is mistaken and to argue that praise is deserving of careful, independent analysis by philosophers interested in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

In many tragic plays, the protagonist is brought down by a disaster that is a consequence of the protagonist's own error, his or her hamartia, the tragic flaw. Tragic flaws are disconcerting to the audience because they are not known or fully recognized by the protagonist—at least not until it is too late. In this essay, I take tragic flaws to be unreliable belief-forming dispositions that are unrecognized by us in some sense. I describe some different types of flaws and (...) consider what we might do about them. Then I examine three types of policies for managing our tragic flaws: doxastic, dispositional, and methodological. (shrink)

Intellectual property has become the apple of discord in today’s moral and political debates. Although it has been approached from many different perspectives, a final conclusion has not been reached. In this paper I will offer a new way of thinking about intellectual property rights (IPRs), from a left-libertarian perspective. My thesis is that IPRs are not (natural) original rights, aprioric rights, as it is usually argued. They are derived rights hence any claim for intellectual property is weaker than the (...) correlative duties attached to self-ownership and world-ownership rights, which are of crucial importance in any left-libertarian view. Moreover, IPRs lack priority in front of these two original rights and should be overridden by stronger claims of justice. Thus, as derived rights, IPRs should not benefit of strong enforcement like any original rights especially if it could be in the latters’ detriment. (shrink)

Intellectual humility is commonly thought to be a mindset, disposition, or personality trait that guides our reactions to evidence as we seek to pursue the truth and avoid error. Over the last decade, psychologists, philosophers, and other researchers have begun to explore intellectual humility, using analytical and empirical tools to understand its nature, implications, and value. This review describes central questions explored by researchers and highlights opportunities for multidisciplinary investigation.

According to “debunking arguments,” our moral beliefs are explained by evolutionary and cultural processes that do not track objective, mind-independent moral truth. Therefore (the debunkers say) we ought to be skeptics about moral realism. Huemer counters that “moral progress”—the cross-cultural convergence on liberalism—cannot be explained by debunking arguments. According to him, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that people have come to recognize the objective correctness of liberalism. Although Huemer may be the first philosopher to make this explicit empirical (...) argument for moral realism, the idea that societies will eventually converge on the same moral beliefs is a notable theme in realist thinking. Antirealists, on the other hand, often point to seemingly intractable cross-cultural moral disagreement as evidence against realism (the “argument from disagreement”). This paper argues that the trend toward liberalism is susceptible to a debunking explanation, being driven by two related non-truth-tracking processes. First, large numbers of people gravitate to liberal values for reasons of self-interest. Second, as societies become more prosperous and advanced, they become more effective at suppressing violence, and they create conditions where people are more likely to empathize with others, which encourages liberalism. The latter process is not truth tracking (or so this paper argues) because empathy-based moral beliefs are themselves susceptible to an evolutionary debunking argument. Cross-cultural convergence on liberalism per se does not support either realism or antirealism. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os usos que Werner Heisenberg fez da filosofia grega em sua obra. Pretende-se relacionar tais usos não apenas com a argumentação interna presente nos textos do físico alemão, mas também com o contexto histórico, conflitos e debates entre as diversas interpretações da teoria dos quanta durante a primeira metade do século XX. Faremos, inicialmente, uma apresentação geral da teoria quântica e da presença da filosofia na obra de Heisenberg e, em seguida, um estudo de (...) caso da apropriação que Heisenberg fez do pensamento de Leucipo, Demócrito, Heráclito, Platão e Aristóteles. (shrink)

The dogma that the propositional logic of metaphysical modality is S5 is rebutted. The author exposes fallacies in standard arguments supporting S5, arguing that propositional metaphysical modal logic is weaker even than both S4 and B, and is instead the minimal and weak metaphysical-modal logic T.

I argue that there is moral luck, i.e., that factors beyond our control can affect how laudable or culpable we are.

In this paper, I aim to defend Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics against what I call the radical hermeneutic critique, specifically the critique developed in Robert Bernasconi’s article “’You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal” (1995). Key to this critique is the claim that Gadamer’s account does not rise to the ethical task of embracing the alterity of the Other, but instead reduces it to a projection of one’s self. The implication is therefore that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (...) has to be rejected on ethical grounds, as it does not appreciate but assimilates the alterity of the Other. In contrast to this radical hermeneutic critique, I argue that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can accommodate an Other that is not assimilated but appreciated, on the condition that the unique status of a dialogue with the Other as a person is no longer neglected, as Gadamer does, but instead truly distinguished from a dialogue with the Other as a text. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that punishment is intentionally harmful and that this makes it especially hard to morally justify. Explanations for the latter intuition often say questionable things about the moral significance of the intent to harm. I argue that there’s a better way to explain this intuition.

A sequel to the author’s book /Frege’s Puzzle/ (1986).

Inflicting harm is generally preferable to inflicting death. If you must choose between the two, you should generally choose to harm. But prenatal harm seems different. If a mother must choose between harming her fetus or aborting it, she may choose either, at least in many cases. So it seems that prenatal harm is particularly objectionable, sometimes on a par with death. This paper offers an explanation of why prenatal harm seems particularly objectionable by drawing an analogy to the all-or-nothing (...) problem. It then argues that this analogy offers independent support for the ‘voluntarist’ view that at least some parental role obligations are grounded in the choice to be a parent. (shrink)

We offer an original argument for the existence of universal fictions—that is, fictions within which every possible proposition is true. Specifically, we detail a trio of such fictions, along with an easy-to-follow recipe for generating more. After exploring several consequences and dismissing some objections, we conclude that fiction, unlike reality, is unlimited when it comes to truth.

Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that the modalist program of analysing essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is fundamentally misguided. Several would-be modalists have since responded, attempting to save the position from this Finean Challenge. This paper evaluates and rejects a trio of such responses, from Della Rocca, Zalta, and Gorman. But I’m not here arguing for Fine’s conclusion – ultimately, this is a fight amongst friends, with Della Rocca, Zalta, Gorman, and (...) I all wanting to be modalists, but disagreeing on the details. As such, while my primary aim is to show what’s wrong with this trio, the secondary aim is demonstrating how what’s right about them in fact pushes one towards my own sparse modalist account. So while the primary conclusion of this paper is negative, the secondary, positive, conclusion is that modalists shouldn’t give up hope – plausible responses to Fine are still out there. (shrink)

Recently, Michael Huemer has defended the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism: If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p. This principle has potentially far-reaching implications. Huemer uses it to argue against skepticism and to defend a version of ethical intuitionism. I employ a reductio to show that PC is false. If PC is true, beliefs can yield justification for believing their contents in cases (...) where, intuitively, they should not be able to do so. I argue that there are cases where a belief that p can behave like an appearance that p and thereby make it seem to one that p. (shrink)

A Russellian notion of what it is for a proposition to be “directly about” something in particular is defined. Various strong and weak, and mediate and immediate, Russellian notions of general aboutness are then defined in terms of Russellian direct aboutness. In particular, a proposition is about something iff the proposition is either directly, or strongly indirectly, about that thing. A competing Russellian account, due to Kaplan, is criticized through a distinction between knowledge by description and denoting by description. The (...) epistemological significance of Russellian aboutness is assessed. A Russellian substitute for de re propositional attitude is considered. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that an agent punishes a subject only if the agent aims to harm the subject. Bill Wringe has recently argued against this claim. I show that his arguments fail.

I defend the widely-held view that morally worthy action need not be motivated by a desire to promote rightness as such. Some have recently come to reject this view, arguing that desires for rightness as such are necessary for avoiding a certain kind of luck thought incompatible with morally worthy action. I show that those who defend desires for rightness as such on the basis of this argument misunderstand the relationship between moral worth and the kind of luck that their (...) argument employs. Consequently, the argument provides no reason to doubt the popular view that a desire for rightness as such is no part of virtue. I conclude by suggesting that a family of worries about merely accidentally right action presuppose one side of the recent debate about objectivism and perspectivism about moral rightness. (shrink)

I argue that legal punishment is morally wrong because it’s too morally risky. I first briefly explain how my argument differs from similar ones in the philosophical literature on legal punishment. Then I explain why legal punishment is morally risky, argue that it’s too morally risky, and discuss objections. In a nutshell, my argument goes as follows. Legal punishment is wrong because we can never sufficiently reduce the risk of doing wrong when we legally punish people. We can never sufficiently (...) reduce this risk because wrongful punishment is much worse than wrongful non-punishment and because punishment’s permissibility depends on the answers to a variety of difficult philosophical questions about which we’re fallible. (shrink)

The past decade and a half has seen an absolute explosion of literature discussing the structure of reality. One particular focus here has been on the fundamental. However, while there has been extensive discussion, numerous fundamental questions about fundamentality have not been touched upon. In this chapter, I focus on one such lacuna about the modal strength of fundamentality. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the contingent fundamentality thesis - that is, the idea that the fundamentalia are only contingently (...) fundamental (or, in property-terms, that the property of being fundamental is not a (weakly) necessary property). And while I think this thesis is plausible – indeed, I show here that it lurks in the unexamined shadows/assumptions of some fairly prominent positions – as far as I can tell, nothing has been said either for or against it. Here, I hope to fix this by giving the thesis a proper airing. In this way, this chapter represents a first-pass at exploring not only the modal status of fundamentality, but also offers a starting point for examining broader issues about the relationship between fundamentality and modality. (shrink)

I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emotions and their associated behaviors. I offer more sophisticated accounts of punishment, of these emotions and of their associated behaviors that are consistent (...) with Abolitionism, the view that punishment is unjustified. (shrink)