Contributors: -/- John Beatty (British Columbia); Kelly James Clark (Ibn Haldun, Istanbul); Angela Coventry (Portland State); Thomas Holden (UC Santa Barbara); Willem Lemmens (Antwerp); Robin Le Poidevin (Leeds); Jennifer Marusic (Edinburgh); Kevin Meeker (South Alabama); Amyas Merivale (Oxford); Peter Millican (Oxford); Dan O’Brien (Oxford Brookes); Graham Oppy (Monash); Paul Russell (Lund); Andre C. Willis (Brown).

The article analyses the concept of indirect discrimination, arguing first that existing conceptualisations are unsatisfactory and second that it is best understood as equal treatment that is disadvantageous to the discriminatees because of their group-membership. I explore four ways of further refining the definition, arguing that only an added condition of moral wrongness is at once plausible and helpful, but that it entails a number of new problems that may outweigh its benefits. Finally, I suggest that the moral wrongness of (...) indirect discrimination is best accounted for in terms of the harm it does to discriminatees, and sketch three ways in which it may do so. I conclude that the analysis provides both a clearer understanding of the concept of indirect discrimination as well as indirect support for a harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination, while suggesting that our moral obligations qua non-discrimination may be more extensive than is frequently assumed. (shrink)

Criminalisation of prostitution, and minority rights for disabled persons, are important contemporary political issues. The article examines their intersection by analysing the conditions and arguments for making a legal exception for disabled persons to a general prohibition against purchasing sexual services. It explores the badness of prostitution, focusing on and discussing the argument that prostitution harms prostitutes, considers forms of regulation and the arguments for and against with emphasis on a liberty-based objection to prohibition, and finally presents and analyses three (...) arguments for a legal exception, based on sexual rights, beneficence, and luck egalitarianism, respectively. It concludes that although the general case for and against criminalisation is complicated there is a good case for a legal exception. (shrink)

Since the middle of the 20th century, philosophers and legal scholars have debated the precise definition of punishment. This chapter surveys the debate, identifies six potential conditions of punishment, and critically reviews each of them: 1) the response condition, which holds that punishment must be in response to wrongdoing, 2) the culpability condition, which holds that punishment must be of a person morally responsible for wrongdoing, 3) the authority condition, which holds that punishment must be imposed by a relevant authority, (...) 4) the hard treatment condition, which holds that punishment must impose hard consequences on the punishee, 5) the intentionality condition, which holds that punishment must be intentional, and 6) the censure condition, which holds that punishment must communicate disapproval. The article argues that it is often unclear that there is a version of the condition that provides optimal lexical fit. It discusses the implications of this analysis, and concludes that there may be less reason to worry about the lack of an authoritative definition than has sometimes been assumed, but that definitional clarity remains an objective worth pursuing. (shrink)

The article explores one prominent account of what makes discrimination morally bad (when it is) – the disrespect-based account. The article first reviews and clarifies the account, arguing that it is most charitably understood as the claim that discrimination is morally bad when the discriminator gives lower weight to reasons grounded in the moral status of the discriminatee(s) in her decision-making. It then presents three challenges to the account, and reviews a recent argument in defense of it. The first challenge (...) is the fact that intuitions that might support the disrespect-based account can also be explained by reference to the fact that disrespect reflects poorly on the moral character of the discriminator. The second challenge is that there are cases where disrespectful discrimination is not intuitively worse than non-disrespectful discrimination. The third challenge is that the disrespect-based account has difficulties explaining our intuitions about cases of “doing right for the wrong reasons”. Finally, pace a recent argument in its defense, cases of harmless and apparently morally bad discrimination are plausibly best explained by other factors than disrespect. In the light of this analysis, the article concludes that the disrespect-based account should be abandoned. (shrink)

In this article I critically examine a standard feature in conceptions of discrimination: the group-criterion, specifically the idea that there is a limited and definablegroup of traits that can form the basis of discrimination. I review two types of argument for the criterion. One focuses on inherently relevant groups and relies ultimately on luck-egalitarian principles; the other focuses on contextually relevant groups and relies ultimately on the badness of outcomes. I conclude that as neither type of argument is convincing, the (...) criterion is morally arbitrary, and as such untenable. Finally, I suggest both some of the conceptual and some of the practical implications of abandoning the criterion. (shrink)

This article analyses proportionality as a potential element of a theory of morally justified surveillance, and sets out a teleological account. It draws on conceptions in criminal justice ethics and just war theory, defines teleological proportionality in the context of surveillance, and sketches some of the central values likely to go into the consideration. It then explores some of the ways in which deontologists might want to modify the account and illustrates the difficulties of doing so. Having set out the (...) account, however, it considers whether the proportionality condition is necessary to a theory of morally justified surveillance. The article concludes that we need and should apply only a necessity condition, but notes that proportionality considerations may retain some use in in practice, as a form of coarse‐grained filter applied before assessing necessity when deliberating the permissibility of potential forms of surveillance. (shrink)

We describe a prototype ontology-driven information system (ODIS) that exploits what we call Portion of Reality (POR) representations. The system takes both sensor data and natural language text as inputs and composes on this basis logically structured POR assertions. The goal of our prototype is to represent both natural language and sensor data within a single framework that is able to support both axiomatic reasoning and computation. In addition, the framework should be capable of discovering and representing new kinds of (...) situations and thematic roles, (e.g., roles such as agent, patient and instrument), based on new compositions of existing representations. We applied our prototype in an intelligence analysis use case to test the hypothesis that a framework of this sort can produce usefully structured information from combined natural language and sensor data inputs. We further tested our hypothesis by adding an enhanced US Air Force ontology framework to our ODIS in order to (1) process a collection of sensor data, intel reports, and mission plans; (2) build composite POR representations from these data; and (3) machine analyze the fused results to infer mission threats. (shrink)

The concept of surveillance has recently been complemented by the concept of sousveillance. Neither term, however, has been rigorously defined, and it is particularly unclear how to understand and delimit sousveillance. This article sketches a generic definition of surveillance and proceeds to explore various ways in which we might define sousveillance, including power differentials, surreptitiousness, control, reciprocity, and moral valence. It argues that for each of these ways of defining it, sousveillance either fails to be distinct from surveillance or to (...) provide a generally useful concept. As such, the article concludes that academics should avoid the neologism, and simply clarify what sense of surveillance is at stake when necessary. (shrink)

Automated decision making for sentencing is the use of a software algorithm to analyse a convicted offender’s case and deliver a sentence. This chapter reviews the moral arguments for and against employing automated decision making for sentencing and finds that its use is in principle morally permissible. Specifically, it argues that well-designed automated decision making for sentencing will better approximate the just sentence than human sentencers. Moreover, it dismisses common concerns about transparency, privacy and bias as unpersuasive or inapplicable. The (...) chapter also notes that moral disagreement about theories of just sentencing are plausibly resolved by applying the principle of maximising expected moral choiceworthiness, and that automated decision making is better suited to the resulting ensemble model. Finally, the chapter considers the challenge posed by penal populism. The dispiriting conclusion is that although it is in theory morally desirable to use automated decision-making for criminal sentencing, it may well be the case that we ought not to try. (shrink)

Algorithmic discrimination has rapidly become a topic of intense public and academic interest. This article explores three issues raised by algorithmic discrimination: 1) the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination, 2) the notion of disadvantageous treatment, and 3) the moral badness of discriminatory automated decision-making. It argues that some conventional distinctions between direct and indirect discrimination appear not to apply to algorithmic discrimination, that algorithmic discrimination may often be discrimination between groups, as opposed to against groups, and that it is (...) not necessarily the case that morally bad algorithmic discrimination gives us reason to not use automated decision-making. For each of the three issues, the article explores implications for algorithmic discrimination, suggests some alternative answers, and clarifies how we may want to think of discrimination more broadly in light of lessons drawn from the context of algorithmic discrimination. (shrink)

Over the past decade, police departments in many countries have experimented with and increasingly adopted the use of police body-worn cameras. This article aims to examine the moral issues raised by the use of PBWCs, and to provide an overall assessment of the conditions under which the use of PBWCs is morally permissible. It first reviews the current evidence for the effects of using PBWCs. On the basis of this review the article sets out a teleological argument for the use (...) of PBWCs. The final two sections of the article review two deontological objections to the use of PBWCs: the idea that use of PBWCs is based on or expresses disrespectful mistrust, and the idea that the use of PBWCs violates a right to privacy. The article argues that neither of these objections is persuasive, and concludes that we should conditionally accept and support the use of PBWCs. (shrink)

This article analyses the moral status of racial profiling from a consequentialist perspective and argues that, contrary to what proponents of racial profiling might assume, there is a prima facie case against racial profiling on consequentialist grounds. To do so it establishes general definitions of police practices and profiling, sketches out the costs and benefits involved in racial profiling in particular and presents three challenges. The foundation challenge suggests that the shifting of burdens onto marginalized minorities may, even when profiling (...) itself is justified, serve to prolong unjustified police practices. The valuation challenge argues that although both costs and benefits are difficult to establish, the benefits of racial profiling are afflicted with greater uncertainty than the costs, and must be comparatively discounted. Finally, the application challenge argues that using racial profiling in practice will be complicated by both cognitive and psychological biases, which together reduce the effectiveness of profiling while still incurring its costs. Jointly, it is concluded, these challenges establish a prima facie case against racial profiling, so that the real challenge consists in helping officers practice the art of the police and not see that which it is useless that they should see. (shrink)

The Ouroboros Model features a biologically inspired cognitive architecture. At its core lies a self-referential recursive process with alternating phases of data acquisition and evaluation. Memory entries are organized in schemata. The activation at a time of part of a schema biases the whole structure and, in particular, missing features, thus triggering expectations. An iterative recursive monitor process termed "consumption analysis" is then checking how well such expectations fit with successive activations. Mismatches between anticipations based on previous experience and actual (...) current data are highlighted and used for controlling the allocation of attention. In case no directly fitting filler for an open slot is found, activation spreads more widely and includes data relating to the actor, and Higher-Order Personality Activation, HOPA, ensues. It is briefly outlined how the Ouroboros Model produces many diverse characteristics and thus addresses established criteria for consciousness. Coarse-grained relationships to selected previous conceptualizations of consciousness and a sketch of how the Ouroboros Model could shed light on current research themes in artificial general intelligence and consciousness conclude this paper. (shrink)

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

Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory (...) (Rome) with the goal of addressing problems of these sorts through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. The interactions of world state, blue force status and associated plans are too complex for manual adaptive processes, and computer-aided plan review and maintenance is thus indispensable. We argue that appropriate semantic technology can 1) provide richer representation of plan-related data and semantics, 2) allow for flexible, non-disruptive, agile, scalable, and coordinated changes in plans, and 3) support more intelligent analytical querying of plan-related data. (shrink)

Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy this, by exploring the various ways in which a principle of equality before the law can be understood and suggest a concise definition. With a clearer understanding of the principle in hand we are better equipped to assess traditional critique of the principle. Doing so is the second ambition of (...) this paper. I will argue that traditional criticisms are unpersuasive, but that there is a different, powerful argument against equality before the law. The third ambition of the paper is to argue that there is a sense, overlooked by both proponents and critics, in which the principle still captures something important, albeit at the cost of shifting from intrinsic to instrumental value. (shrink)

Over the past decade, scholars, institutions, and activists have voiced strong concerns about the potential of automated decision systems to indirectly discriminate against vulnerable groups. This article analyses the ethics of algorithmic indirect discrimination, and argues that we can explain what is morally bad about such discrimination by reference to the fact that it causes harm. The article first sketches certain elements of the technical and conceptual background, including definitions of direct and indirect algorithmic differential treatment. It next introduces three (...) prominent accounts of fairness as potential explanations if the badness of algorithmic indirect discrimination, but argues that all three are vulnerable to powerful levelling-down-style objections. Instead, the article demonstrates how proper attention to the way differences in decision-scenarios affect the distribution of harms can help us account for intuitions in prominent cases. Finally, the article considers a potential objection based on the fact that certain forms of algorithmic indirect discrimination appear to distribute rather than cause harm, and notes that we can explain how such distributions cause harm by attending to differences in individual and group vulnerability. (shrink)

Norwood Russell Hanson was one of the most important philosophers of science of the post-war period. Hanson brought Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy to bear on the concepts of science, and his treatments of observation, discovery, and the theory-ladenness of scientific facts remain central to the philosophy of science. Additionally, Hanson was one of philosophy’s great personalities, and his sense of humor and charm come through fully in the pages of Perception and Discovery. -/- Perception and Discovery, originally published in 1969, (...) is Hanson’s posthumous textbook in philosophy of science. The book focuses on the indispensable role philosophy plays in scientific thinking. Perception and Discovery features Hanson’s most complete and mature account of theory-laden observation, a discussion of conceptual and logical boundaries, and a detailed treatment of the epistemological features of scientific research and scientific reasoning. This book is of interest to scholars of philosophy of science, particularly those concerned with Hanson’s thought and the development of the discipline in the middle of the 20th century. However, even fifty years after Hanson’s early death, Perception and Discovery still has a great deal to offer all readers interested in science. (shrink)

The article analyses the necessary conditions an argument for popular punishment would need to meet, and argues that it faces the challenge of a dilemma of reasonableness: either popular views on punishment are unreasonable, in which case they should carry no weight, or they are reasonable, in which case the reasons that support them, not the views, should carry weight. It proceeds to present and critically discuss three potential solutions to the dilemma, arguing that only an argument for the beneficial (...) effects of coherence between popular views and penal policy is persuasive, but that it makes popular punishment less important than proponents claim, and offers a justification proponents will find it difficult to advance. (shrink)

Not only the direct physical experiences of deployment can severely harm soldiers’ mental health. Witnessing violations of their moral principles by the enemy, or by their fellow soldiers and superiors, can also have a devastating impact. It can cause soldiers’ moral disorientation, increasing feelings of shame, guilt, or hate, and the need for general answers on questions of right and wrong. Various attempts have been made to keep soldiers mentally sane. One is to provide convincing causes for their deployment, which (...) risks an “end justifies the means” way of thinking. The good cause can provide a moral justification for horrible atrocities. Another method, introduced in the USA, Canada, and Australia, aims to strengthen military personnel’s resistance by promoting and maintaining a happy, optimistic state of mind through the use of positive psychology. Alongside making soldiers “morally fit” for all kinds of situations, the focus could also be on moral recovery and forgiveness. Such a care-based military ethics approach, aimed at mutual understanding and interdependence, could help soldiers handle the emotional impact of moral conflicts. This demands that military units reflect on their organizational culture and rethink oaths and codes of conduct that focus mainly on efficiency and readiness, as well as the soldierly self-image with its seemingly still deeply rooted warrior ethos. Today, resilience and positive psychology in the military is apparently mainly geared to assuring its soldiers’ readiness. An appropriate set of virtues and understanding of virtue ethics that are less centered on self-perfection and autonomy could point to a different form of character-building and lead to a better understanding of others. (shrink)

The human brain, with its 100 billion neurons working in intricate collaborations to create the physical basis of the memories, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that together make me the person...

Book Symposium on The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015). The author responds to review essays by John Heilbron, Stephen Gaukroger, and Yiftach Fehige.

How much surveillance is morally permissible in the pursuit of a socially desirable goal? The proportionality question has received renewed attention during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, because governments in many countries have responded to the pandemic by implementing, redirecting or expanding state surveillance, most controversially in the shape of collection and use of cell-phone location data to support a strategy of contact tracing, testing and containment. Behind the proportionality question lies a further question: in what way does a state of (...) emergency affect the proportionality of morally permissible surveillance? On the qualitative difference view, a state of emergency has the effect of suspending or altering at least some of the constraints on morally permissible action that apply under ordinary circumstances. On the quantitative difference view, the only difference between states of emergency and ordinary circumstances is that the stakes are greater in a state of emergency. If the qualitative difference view is true, then there are situations, perhaps such as the current Coronavirus pandemic, during which the proportionality condition employs a much less demanding ratio between social goods achieved and the badness of the surveillance performed. The overall objective of this article is to argue against the qualitative and for the quantitative difference view. I proceed by first setting out in somewhat greater detail how we must understand the qualitative difference view (section two). I then present a series of problematic implications of adopting the qualitative difference view and argue that jointly these give us sufficient reason to reject it (section three). This entails that our account of morally permissible surveillance should be unexceptional, i.e. the quantitative difference view: there is no morally significant difference between proportionality in ordinary circumstances and proportionality in emergencies, simply a spectrum of smaller to greater potential goods and bads of surveillance. In order to flesh out the implications of the quantitative view, I briefly sketch an unexceptional theory of proportional surveillance in exceptional circumstances (section four). The last section (five) summarises and concludes. (shrink)

I defend the following version of the ought-implies-can principle: (OIC) by virtue of conceptual necessity, an agent at a given time has an (objective, pro tanto) obligation to do only what the agent at that time has the ability and opportunity to do. In short, obligations correspond to ability plus opportunity. My argument has three premises: (1) obligations correspond to reasons for action; (2) reasons for action correspond to potential actions; (3) potential actions correspond to ability plus opportunity. In the (...) bulk of the paper I address six objections to OIC: three objections based on putative counterexamples, and three objections based on arguments to the effect that OIC conflicts with the is/ought thesis, the possibility of hard determinism, and the denial of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

Insufficient vaccination coverage is an important public health problem in many countries, since it leads to the loss of herd protection and the resurgence of previously exterminated diseases. However, policies of mandatory childhood vaccination capable of raising vaccination rates continue to be controversial. In this article I review the arguments for mandatory childhood vaccination, setting out the strongest teleological argument in favour, and then critically examining the two strongest potential objections: paternalism and the parental prerogative. I argue that the challenge (...) of paternalism fails because it confuses the identities of those subject to restricted liberty and those who autonomously dissent, and because non-vaccination imposes risks on others. I argue that the challenge of a parental prerogative fails because it cannot be intuitively or theoretically supported in a form that would make it permissible to impose risks on others. I conclude that in lieu of further and more plausible objections at least some policies of mandatory childhood vaccination are morally permissible. (shrink)

Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems, but also has far-reaching consequences for (...) our understanding of a host of classical philosophical concepts. (shrink)

This is the full version of the Delphi Report on critical thinking and critical thinking instruction at the post-secondary level.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

You don't say much about who you are teaching, or what subject you teach, but you do seem to see a need to justify what you are doing. Perhaps you're teaching underprivileged children, opening their minds to possibilities that might otherwise never have occurred to them. Or maybe you're teaching the children of affluent families and opening their eyes to the big moral issues they will face in life — like global poverty, and climate change. If you're doing something like (...) this, then stick with it. Giving money isn't the only way to make a difference. (shrink)

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...) bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.

We propose a solution to the problem of logical omniscience in what we take to be its fundamental version: as concerning arbitrary agents and the knowledge attitude per se. Our logic of knowledge is a spin-off from a general theory of thick content, whereby the content of a sentence has two components: an intension, taking care of truth conditions; and a topic, taking care of subject matter. We present a list of plausible logical validities and invalidities for the logic of (...) knowledge per se for arbitrary agents, and isolate three explanatory factors for them: the topic-sensitivity of content; the fragmentation of knowledge states; the defeasibility of knowledge acquisition. We then present a novel dynamic epistemic logic that yields precisely the desired validities and invalidities, for which we provide expressivity and completeness results. We contrast this with related systems and address possible objections. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject (...) instrumentalism on two grounds: (i) because it fails to respect reasonable value pluralism and to recognize the constitutive role of democratic procedures for legitimacy in pluralist societies, and (ii) because it neglects the constructive function of democratic decision-making. I then consider two alternatives to pure epistemic proceduralism: David Estlund's version of epistemic proceduralism and a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy. I argue that only pure epistemic proceduralism can make good on both shortcomings of instrumentalism, whereas each of the other two approaches only makes good on one and neglects the other. (shrink)

When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.

When scientists or science reporters communicate research results to the public, this often involves ethical and epistemic risks. One such risk arises when scientific claims cause cognitive or behavioural changes in the audience that contribute to the self-fulfilment of these claims. I argue that the ethical and epistemic problems that such self-fulfilment effects may pose are much broader and more common than hitherto appreciated. Moreover, these problems are often due to a specific psychological phenomenon that has been neglected in the (...) research on science communication: many people tend to conform to ‘descriptive norms’, that is, norms capturing (perceptions of) what others commonly do, think, or feel. Because of this tendency, science communication may frequently produce significant social harm. I contend that scientists have a responsibility to assess the risk of this potential harm and consider adopting strategies to mitigate it. I introduce one such strategy and argue that its implementation is independently well motivated by the fact that it helps improve scientific accuracy. (shrink)

An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact (...) on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system. (shrink)

A new puzzle of modal recombination is presented which relies purely on resources of first-order modal logic. It shows that naive recombinatorial reasoning, which has previously been shown to be inconsistent with various assumptions concerning propositions, sets and classes, leads to inconsistency by itself. The context sensitivity of modal expressions is suggested as the source of the puzzle, and it is argued that it gives us reason to reconsider the assumption that the notion of metaphysical necessity is in good standing.

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to (...) very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance. Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a declarative from this domain is the property of doxastic attitudes it canonically serves (...) to express. In support, we synthesize data from the critical literature on expressivism—largely reflecting interactions between modals and disjunctions—and present a semantic expressivism that readily predicts the data. This contrasts with salient competitors, including: pragmatic expressivism based on domain semantics or dynamic semantics; semantic expressivism à la Moss [2015]; and the bounded relational semantics of Mandelkern [2019]. (shrink)

How should we undertand the role of norms—especially epistemic norms—governing assertive speech acts? Mitchell Green (2009) has argued that these norms play the role of handicaps in the technical sense from the animal signals literature. As handicaps, they then play a large role in explaining the reliability—and so the stability (the continued prevalence)—of assertive speech acts. But though norms of assertion conceived of as social norms do indeed play this stabilizing role, these norms are best understood as deterrents and not (...) as handicaps. This paper explains the stability problem for the maintenance of animal signals, and so human communication, for we are animals too, after all; the mechanics of the handicap principle; the role of deterrents and punishments as an alternative mechanism; and the role of social norms governing assertion for the case of human communication. (shrink)

We present a formal semantics for epistemic logic, capturing the notion of knowability relative to information (KRI). Like Dretske, we move from the platitude that what an agent can know depends on her (empirical) information. We treat operators of the form K_AB (‘B is knowable on the basis of information A’) as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a topic- or aboutness- preservation constraint. Variable strictness models the non-monotonicity of knowledge acquisition while allowing knowledge to be intrinsically stable. Aboutness-preservation models (...) the topic-sensitivity of information, allowing us to invalidate controversial forms of epistemic closure while validating less controversial ones. Thus, unlike the standard modal framework for epistemic logic, KRI accommodates plausible approaches to the Kripke-Harman dogmatism paradox, which bear on non-monotonicity, or on topic-sensitivity. KRI also strikes a better balance between agent idealization and a non-trivial logic of knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Epistemic defeat is standardly understood in either evidentialist or responsibilist terms. The seminal treatment of defeat is an evidentialist one, due to John Pollock, who famously distinguishes between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. More recently, an orthogonal distinction due to Jennifer Lackey has become widely endorsed, between so-called doxastic (or psychological) and normative defeaters. We think that neither doxastic nor normative defeaters, as Lackey understands them, exist. Both of Lackey’s categories of defeat derive from implausible assumptions about epistemic responsibility. Although Pollock’s (...) evidentialist view is superior, the evidentialism per se can be purged from it, leaving a general structure of defeat that can be incorporated in a reliabilist theory that is neither evidentialist nor responsibilist in any way. (shrink)

Scientists may sometimes generalize from their samples to broader populations when they have not yet sufficiently supported this generalization. Do such hasty generalizations also occur in experimental philosophy? To check, we analyzed 171 experimental philosophy studies published between 2017 and 2023. We found that most studies tested only Western populations but generalized beyond them without justification. There was also no evidence that studies with broader conclusions had larger, more diverse samples, but they nonetheless had higher citation impact. Our analyses reveal (...) important methodological limitations of many experimental philosophy studies and suggest that philosophical training may not protect against hasty generalizations. (shrink)