The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate representations of precise protein forms so as to enhance accessibility to results of protein (...) research. PRO (http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro) is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. (shrink)

The view that it is better for life to be created free of disability is pervasive in both common sense and philosophy. We cast doubt on this view by focusing on an influential line of thinking that manifests it. That thinking begins with a widely-discussed principle, Procreative Beneficence, and draws conclusions about parental choice and disability. After reconstructing two versions of this argument, we critique the first by exploring the relationship between different understandings of well-being and disability, and the second (...) by more briefly focusing on the idea of a significant reason. By placing these results against the broader historical and ongoing contexts in which the lives of those with disabilities have been deemed of inferior quality, we conclude with a call for greater humility about disability and well-being in thought and practice. (shrink)

Intellectualists about know-how tend to deny that knowing how to ϕ requires the corresponding ability to ϕ. So, it’s supposed to be an attractive feature of intellectualism that it can explain cases of knowing how without ability, while anti-intellectualism—roughly, the view that knowing how is a kind of ability—cannot. I show that intellectualism fails to explain the very cases that are supposed to showcase this feature of the view. Despite appearances, this does not amount to an objection to intellectualism per (...) se, but to the intellectualist’s rejection of ability entailment. It turns out that all parties to the debate about know-how should accept that knowing how entails ability. The upshot is that the central question of the debate should not be whether knowing how entails ability, but whether ability suffices for knowing how, as anti-intellectualists sometimes claim. (shrink)

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their context (...) of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism. (shrink)

Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appears. We motivate (...) this approach in terms of modal analyses of material constitution, but argue that ultimately it fails. The monist must instead accept a deflationary, symmetrical use of ‘materially constitutes’. We argue that this is a serious cost for her approach. (shrink)

Can hybridism about moral claims be made to work? I argue it can if we accept the conventional implicature approach developed in Barker (Analysis 2000). However, this kind of hybrid expressivism is only acceptable if we can make sense of conventional implicature, the kind of meaning carried by operators like ‘even’, ‘but’, etc. Conventional implictures are a form of pragmatic presupposition, which involves an unsaid mode of delivery of content. I argue that we can make sense of conventional implicatures, (...) but doing so requires we embrace a form of pure, non-hybrid expressivism. This is a cognitivist expressivism I have developed elsewhere. We need cognitivist expressivism to make sense of how we evaluate—judge as correct or incorrect—implicature-bearing sentences. Once we embraced the possibility of this pure expressivism, we might as well be pure expressivists about normative discourse too. I show how we can do that. The motivations for a specifically hybrid theory are dialectically undercut. (shrink)

In this paper, I expand our framework for epistemic injustice by shifting focus from epistemic evaluations of individuals in information exchange to epistemic evaluations of individuals engaging their know-how in performance. I call the injustice to individuals qua knowers-how performative injustice, and I argue that performative injustice has distinct features worth understanding apart from varieties of epistemic injustice devoted to information exchange. I develop an account of the performative authority that is unfairly evaluated in cases of performative injustice and show (...) how, in some cases, cognitive penetration can affect observers’ evaluations. Finally, I show how stereotype threat may short circuit what would otherwise be cases of performative injustice, which in turn reveals the significance of its systemic manifestations. (shrink)

Although Paul Churchland and Jerry Fodor both subscribe to the so-called theory-theory– the theory that folk psychology (FP) is an empirical theory of behavior – they disagree strongly about FP’s fate. Churchland contends that FP is a fundamentally flawed view analogous to folk biology, and he argues that recent advances in computational neuroscience and connectionist AI point toward development of a scientifically respectable replacement theory that will give rise to a new common-sense psychology. Fodor, however, wagers that FP will be (...) largely preserved and vindicated by scientific investigations of behavior. Recent findings by developmental psychologists, I argue, will push both Churchlandians and Fodorians toward the pessimistic view that FP is a misguided theory that will never be displaced, because it is, so to speak, built into our cognitive systems. I explore the possibility of preserving optimism by rejecting the theory-theory and adopting the simulation theory, a competing view developed by Robert Gordon, Alvin Goldman, and Jane Heal. According to simulationists, common-sense interpretation of behavior is accomplished by means of pretense-like operations that deploy the cognitive system’s own reasoning capabilities in a disengaged manner. Since on this view no theory-like set of principles would be needed, the simulation theory seems to enjoy a simplicity advantage over the theory-theory. Steven Stich and Shawn Nichols, however, contend that as the cognitive system would require special mechanisms for disengaged operation, the simplicity question cannot be resolved until suitable computational models are developed. I describe a set of models I have constructed to meet this need, and I discuss the contribution such models can make to determining FP’s fate. (shrink)

The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...) been a focus in some recent discussions by both philosophers and biologists on how evolutionary individuals are created and regulated, as well as continuing work on the evolution of individuality. (shrink)

Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making (...) and truth-making, and in constituting holes and edges. (shrink)

Tamar Gendler takes on “explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant” (56), otherwise known as the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Generally speaking, readers have no trouble believing untrue factual claims such as in Alice in Wonderland or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but we resist claims which advocate praise or approval of immoral acts such as murder. Gendler submits that the implied author aims to persuade the reader to change his or her (...) moral beliefs, thereby causing imaginative resistance. This paper will explain that imaginative resistance is fundamentally an interpersonal moral conflict as experienced in the ethical theory of moral subjectivism, and will suggest ways to manage imaginative resistance by looking at the whole work of fiction. (shrink)

A fundamental fact is “pure” just in case it has no grounded entities—ex. Tokyo, President Biden, the River Nile, {Socrates}, etc.—among its constituents. Purity is the thesis that every fundamental fact is pure. I argue that Purity is false. My argument begins with a familiar conditional: if Purity is true, then there are no fundamental “grounding facts” or facts about what grounds what. This conditional is accepted by virtually all of Purity’s defenders. However, I argue that it is also the (...) first step toward Purity’s undoing. For, if every grounding fact has a ground, then some grounded entities have “groundmates” or distinct grounded entities that share their full grounds. But, if there are groundmates, then Purity is false. So Purity leads to a contradiction. Therefore, it is false. I close by noting that my argument against Purity also gives us a powerful reason to think that some grounding facts are fundamental. (shrink)

I argue that one’s views about which “metaphysical laws” obtain—including laws about what is identical with what, about what is reducible to what, and about what grounds what—can be used to deflect or neutralize the threat posed by a debunking explanation. I use a well-known debunking argument in the metaphysics of material objects as a case study. Then, after defending the proposed strategy from the charge of question-begging, I close by showing how the proposed strategy can be used by certain (...) moral realists to resist the evolutionary debunking arguments. (shrink)

This paper argues that the new metaphysics of powers, also known as dispositional essentialism or causal structuralism, is an illusory metaphysics. I argue for this in the following way. I begin by distinguishing three fundamental ways of seeing how facts of physical modality — facts about physical necessitation and possibility, causation, disposition, and chance — are grounded in the world. The first way, call it the first degree, is that the actual world or all worlds, in their entirety, are the (...) source of physical modality. Humeanism is the best known such approach, but there are other less well-known approaches. The second way, the second degree, is that the source of physical modality lies in certain second-order facts, involving a relation between universals. Armstrong’s necessitarianism and other views are second-degree views. The third way, the third degree, holds that properties themselves are the source of physical modality. This is the powers view. I examine four ways of developing the third degree: relational constitution, graph-theoretic structuralism, dispositional roles, and powerful qualities. All these ways are either incoherent, or just disguised versions of the first-degree. The new metaphysics of powers is illusory. With the collapse of the third degree, the second degree, the necessitarian view of law, collapses as well. I end the paper with some reflections on the first degree, on the problem of explaining necessary connections between distinct existences, and on the dim prospects of holist ontology. (shrink)

In this paper we present a new metaphysical theory of material objects. On our theory, objects are bundles of property instances, where those properties give the nature or essence of that object. We call the theory essential bundle theory. Property possession is not analysed as bundle-membership, as in traditional bundle theories, since accidental properties are not included in the object’s bundle. We have a different story to tell about accidental property possession. This move reaps many benefits. Essential bundle theory delivers (...) a simple theory of the essential properties of material objects; an explanation of how object coincidence can arise; an actual-world ground for modal differences between coincident objects; a simple story about intrinsic properties; and a plausible account of certain ubiquitous cases of causal overdetermination. (shrink)

According to the Ontological Innocence Thesis (OIT), grounded entities are ontologically innocent relative to their full grounds. I argue that OIT entails a contradiction, and therefore must be discarded. My argument turns on the notion of “groundmates,” two or more numerically distinct entities that share at least one of their full grounds. I argue that, if OIT is true, then it is both the case that there are groundmates and that there are no groundmates. Therefore, so I conclude, OIT is (...) false. Moreover, once we have seen why OIT is false, only three heterodox views about reality's structure remain. So this paper’s second conclusion is that, even after we have discarded OIT, we are in for an additional surprise. (shrink)

Bird argues that Armstrong’s necessitarian conception of physical modality and laws of nature generates a vicious regress with respect to necessitation. We show that precisely the same regress afflicts Bird’s dispositional-monist theory, and indeed, related views, such as that of Mumford & Anjum. We argue that dispositional monism is basically Armstrongian necessitarianism modified to allow for a thesis about property identity.

This chapter analyzes several key themes in Kant’s views about modality. We begin with the pre-critical Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in which Kant distinguishes between formal and material elements of possibility, claims that all possibility requires an actual ground, and argues for the existence of a single necessary being. We then briefly consider how Kant’s views change in his mature period, especially concerning the role of form and thought in defining modality. (...) Kant’s mature views, however, present two difficult interpretive puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether Kant has a generally reductive view of modality. While Kant’s views on logical modality, the role of actuality in grounding possibility, and the relation of modality to cognition all suggest reduction, we argue that the categorial status of modal concepts and the difficulty in even identifying amodal grounds for modal facts all suggest a non-reductive view. The second puzzle concerns whether Kant accepts modal facts or properties at the noumenal level. While Kant’s appeal to noumenal necessary connections, the contingency of noumenal willing, and the idea of a necessary noumenal being suggest that he endorses noumenal modality, his claims that modal concepts express only relations to the faculty of cognition and his claim that modal concepts arise from our distinctive psychological structures, we argue, suggest that he rejects noumenal modality. We conclude by considering potential solutions to these puzzles. (shrink)

This letter was submitted to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Government of Canada, on 29th January, 2021, as final debate over Bill C-7 was being undertaken in the Senate regarding MAiD and the strong opposition to the legislation expressed across the Canadian disability community. It draws on our individual and joint work on eugenics, well-being, and disability.

A far-reaching and influential view in evolutionary biology claims that species are cohesive units held together by gene flow. Biologists have recognized empirical problems facing this view; after sharpening the expression of the view, we present novel conceptual problems for it. At the heart of these problems is a distinction between two importantly different concepts of cohesion, what we call integrative and response cohesion. Acknowledging the distinction problematizes both the explanandum of species cohesion and the explanans of gene flow that (...) are central to the view we discuss. We conclude by tracing four broader implications for the study and conceptualization of species. (shrink)

This volume has its roots in two recent developments within mainstream analytic epistemology: a growing recognition over the past two or three decades of the active and social nature of our epistemic lives; and, more recently still, the increasing appreciation of the various ways in which the epistemic practices of individuals and societies can, and often do, go wrong. The theoretical analysis of these breakdowns in epistemic practice, along with the various harms and wrongs that follow as a consequence, constitutes (...) an approach to epistemology that we refer to as non-ideal epistemology. In this introductory chapter we introduce and contextualise the ten essays that comprise this volume, situating them within four broad sub-fields: vice epistemology, epistemic injustice, inter-personal epistemic practices, and applied epistemology. We also provide a brief overview of several other important growth areas in non-ideal epistemology. (shrink)

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)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

In “Beat the (Backward) Clock,” we argued that John Williams and Neil Sinhababu’s Backward Clock Case fails to be a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s or Fred Dretske’s Theories of Knowledge. Williams’ reply to our paper, “There’s Nothing to Beat a Backward Clock: A Rejoinder to Adams, Barker and Clarke,” is a further attempt to defend their counterexample against a range of objections. In this paper, we argue that, despite the number and length of footnotes, Williams is still wrong.

My goal is to illuminate truth-making by way of illuminating the relation of making. My strategy is not to ask what making is, in the hope of a metaphysical theory about is nature. It's rather to look first to the language of making. The metaphor behind making refers to agency. It would be absurd to suggest that claims about making are claims about agency. It is not absurd, however, to propose that the concept of making somehow emerges from some feature (...) to do with agency. That's the contention to be explore in this paper. The way to do this is through expressivism,. Truth-making claims, and making-claims generfally, are claims in which we express mental states linked to our maipulation of concepts, like truth. In particular, they express disposition to undertake derivations using inference rules, in which introduction rules have a specific role. I then show how this theory explains our intuitions about truth's asymmetric dependence on being. (shrink)

To better navigate social interactions, we routinely (consciously or unconsciously) categorize people based on their distinctive features. One important way we do this is by ascribing political orientations to them. For example, based on certain behavioral cues, we might perceive someone as politically liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian, Marxist, anarchist, or fascist. Although such ascriptions may appear to be mere descriptions, I argue that they can have deeper, regulative effects on their targets, potentially politicizing and polarizing them in ways that remain (...) underexplored in research on political polarization. To capture this dynamic, I introduce the notion of ‘politicizing mindshaping,’ distinguish it from other types of politicization, and review evidence suggesting that politicizing mindshaping is likely common. Finally, I contend that the pernicious effects of politicizing mindshaping may currently be significantly underestimated. This is because, unlike in many other cases of social labeling, negativity in political labeling is, to some extent, widely tolerated – even encouraged – and largely unconstrained by social norms in democratic countries. (shrink)

At the heart of semantics in the 20th century is Frege’s distinction between sense and force. This is the idea that the content of a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One part, the sense, is the proposition that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it as its semantic interpretation. The second component is S’s illocutionary force. Illocutionary forces correspond to the three basic kinds of sentential speech acts: assertions, orders, and questions. Forces (...) are then kinds of acts in which propositions are deployed with certain purposes. I sketch a speech-act theoretic semantics in which that distinction does not hold. Instead of propositions and forces, the theory proposes proto-illocutionary acts and illocutionary acts. The orthodox notion of a proposition plays no role in the framework, which is a good thing, since that notion is deeply problematic. The framework also shows how expressionists, who embrace a sophisticated speech-act framework, face no Frege-Geach embedding problem, since the latter assumes the Sense/Force distinction. (shrink)

When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy render it irrational to continue holding that belief? According to explanationism, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to an epistemic defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a “sparse” ontology of worldly facts or states of (...) affairs. I then propose a new explanationist account of genealogical defeat capable of accommodating rational belief in ontological sparsity. According to my account, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to a defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to its truthmaker. (shrink)

Closure is the epistemological thesis that if S knows that P and knows that P implies Q, then if S infers that Q, S knows that Q. Fred Dretske acknowledges that closure is plausible but contends that it should be rejected because it conflicts with the plausible thesis: Conclusive reasons (CR): S knows that P only if S believes P on the basis of conclusive reasons, i.e., reasons S wouldn‘t have if it weren‘t the case that P. Dretske develops an (...) analysis of knowing that centers on CR, and argues that the requirement undermines skepticism by implying the falsity of closure. We develop a Dretske-style analysis of knowing that incorporates CR, and we argue that this analysis not only accords with closure, but also implies it. In addition, we argue that the analysis accounts for the prima facie plausibility of closure-invoking skeptical arguments, and nonetheless implies that they are fallacious. If our arguments turn out to be sound, the acceptability of Dretske‘s analysis of knowing will be significantly enhanced by the fact that, despite implying closure, it undermines closure-based skepticism. (shrink)

This paper isolates a hard, long-standing species problem: developing a comprehensive and exacting theory about the constitutive conditions of the species category, one that is accurate for most of the living world, and which vindicates the widespread view that the species category is of more theoretical import than categories such as genus, sub-species, paradivision, and stirp. The paper then uncovers flaws in several views that imply we have either already solved that hard species problem or dissolved it altogether – so-called (...) We Are Done views. In doing so the paper offers new criticisms of the general lineage species concept (GLSC), evolutionary species concept (EvSC), biological species concept (BSC), other similar concepts, Ereshefsky’s eliminative pluralism about the species category, and both Mishler’s pessimism and Wilkins’ phenomenalism about that category. Opposed to We Are Done views, the paper argues for a Revving Up view, on which we are nearly ready to begin the hard species problem in earnest. To help work towards these conclusions, the paper begins with an outline of a new kind of view of species (Barker 2019a), which proposes they are feedback systems of a mathematically specifiable and empirically testable sort. (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)

We uncover a largely unnoticed and unaddressed problem in conservation research: arguments built within studies are sometimes defective in more fundamental and specific ways than appreciated, because they misrelate values and empirical matters. We call this the unraveled rope problem because just as strands of rope must be properly and intricately wound with each other so the rope supports its load, empirical aspects and value aspects of an argument must be related intricately and properly if the argument is to objectively (...) support its conclusion. By characterizing this problem with precision, our study differs from but complements existing studies of value issues in conservation science, in two ways. First, it focuses on key relationships between empirical issues and value issues, relations that have sometimes been obscured by focusing on these issues more independently of each other. Second, it focuses on these relationships within arguments and deploys a method of argument analysis and evaluation honed in other fields but under-utilized in conservation science. By combining our study's novel features, we detail six families of argument defect that exemplify the unraveled rope problem within existing literature. These defects sometimes manifest within basic research stages, rather than just in more applied downstream stages where roles for values are already obvious to many. As scientific reasoning and communication become increasingly important for addressing society's greatest environmental challenges, overcoming the unraveled rope problem will be essential to the success and integrity of conservation research. Therefore, we also outline potential solutions, preventative measures, and useful further work for conservation researchers. (shrink)

I use the principle of truth-maker maximalism to provide a new solution to the semantic paradoxes. According to the solution, AUS, its undecidable whether paradoxical sentences are grounded or ungrounded. From this it follows that their alethic status is undecidable. We cannot assert, in principle, whether paradoxical sentences are true, false, either true or false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. AUS involves no ad hoc modification of logic, denial of the T-schema's validity, or obvious (...) revenge. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

I argue that Lewis's counterfactual theory of causation, given his treatment of counterfactuals in terms of world-comparative similarity faces insuperable problems in the form of the problem of effects and the problem of epiphenomena.

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.

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

When is a testimony-based belief justified? According to so-called "Anti-Reductionism," the principle that a hearer is prima facie justified to take what another tells them at face value is true. I call this position "Liberal Foundationalism." I call it "liberal" for it is more liberal than "Moderate Foundationalism" that holds that perception-based beliefs are prima facie justified but testimony-based beliefs are not. Liberal Foundationalism has two interpretations: the principle is a contingent empirical truth, or an a priori necessary truth. I (...) call the view that the principle is a priori necessary "Liberal Fundamentalism." This chapter defends Liberal Fundamentalism against objections in the first half, and then in the second half it introduces "Weak Liberal Fundamentalism," the view that it is a priori necessary that testimony provides some epistemic support, but perhaps not enough, absent defeat, for knowledge. In later work I abandon the view that the principle is a priori necessary, but I still maintain the distinction between Strong and Weak variants of the principle, and the replies to many of the objections to the principle. (shrink)

The standard view about counterfactuals is that a counterfactual (A > C) is true if and only if the A-worlds most similar to the actual world @ are C-worlds. I argue that the worlds conception of counterfactuals is wrong. I assume that counterfactuals have non-trivial truth-values under physical determinism. I show that the possible-worlds approach cannot explain many embeddings of the form (P > (Q > R)), which intuitively are perfectly assertable, and which must be true if the contingent falsity (...) of (Q > R) is to be explained. If (P > (Q > R)) has a backtracking reading then the contingent facts that (Q > R) needs to be true in the closest P-worlds are absent. If (P > (Q > R)) has a forwardtracking reading, then the laws required by (Q > R) to be true in the closest P-worlds will be absent, because they are violated in those worlds. Solutions like lossy laws or denial of embedding won't work. The only approach to counterfactuals that explains the embedding is a pragmatic metalinguistic approach in which the whole idea that counterfactuals are about a modal reality, be it abstract or concrete, is given up. (shrink)

This ~4000 word essay introduces topics of essentialism, as they arise in social sciences. It distinguishes empirical (e.g., psychological) from philosophical studies of essentialisms, and both metaphysical and scientific essentialisms within philosophy. Essentialism issues in social science are shown to be more subtle and complex than often presumed.

Recent discussions in the history of analytic philosophy have targeted questions about the concept of ‘Analytic Philosophy’ itself. Scholars, such as Glock (2008) and Preston (2004), have argued that ‘Analytic Philosophy’ cannot plausibly be characterised in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and that other, more pragmatic, approaches must be taken instead. In this paper, we argue that similar questions that have recently emerged about the status of ‘Western Philosophy’ can be informed by these debates in the history of analytic (...) philosophy. Some recent scholars, most notably Platzky Miller (2023) and Cantor (2022), have argued that the concept of ‘Western philosophy’ should be abandoned altogether, due to its incoherence and the role it plays in upholding and perpetuating various exclusionary mechanisms and politically dubious aims. The aim of this paper is to apply the lessons learnt from similar discussions about ‘Analytic Philosophy’ and to build on Platzky Miller’s and Cantor’s innovative proposals. We argue that the term should not be abandoned altogether and that continuing to use it is required for combating exclusions in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

[Newspaper Opinion] Before the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying fall in oil prices, a carbon price would have been immediately painful for the countries that imposed it, but far better for everyone over the longer term. In this unprecedented moment, introducing a carbon price would be beneficial both now and for the future.

A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism’s opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non-empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentious premises, the empirical findings do not undermine the theory, given its overall philosophical (...) commitments. Thus, contemporary empirical research fails to supply any new argumentative force against naïve realism. I conclude that, as philosophers of mind, we would be better served spending a bit less time trying to wield empirical science as a cudgel against our opponents, and a bit more time working through the implications of each other’s views – something we can accomplish perfectly well from the comfort of our armchairs. (shrink)

This entry provides an opinionated overview of central debates surrounding doxastic disagreement, focusing on doxastic states or attitudes such as beliefs and credences. It differentiates between various types of epistemologically significant disagreement based on the agents involved and the source of the disagreement. It also examines and evaluates current accounts of how peers should (rationally) address disagreement and highlights the fundamental principles that support these accounts.

Governments standardly deploy a distinction between goods and services in assessing economic health and tracking national income statistics, of which medical goods and services carry significant importance. In what follows we draw on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to introduce a third kind of entity called patterns, which help capture the various ways in which goods and services are intertwined and help also to show how many services generate a new kind of non-goods-related products. Patterns are an overlooked yet essential features (...) of many economic sectors including medicine. Studying patterns offers new insights into various components of economic analysis, including outcomes-oriented evaluations of medical services and the value of human capital in the medical sphere. (shrink)

The attachment for download here merely references my 5,500-word final and extended article, criticising those who seek to justify Israeli attacks on Gaza. The article is published online by Daily Philosophy, 5th January 2024, link shown below. -/- After a background of facts (probably well-known by readers concerned about the matters), the article examines typical arguments much used in the media as attempts to justify Israel’s determined destruction of Gaza, involving well over twenty thousand Palestinians killed, hundreds of thousands suffering (...) appalling injuries and two million having their lives and livihoods shattered. -/- I expose inconsistencies, poor reasoning and immoralities of those who support Israeli actions. There is a final touch of Kant and Nietzsche - and use of the saying attributed to Jesus: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (shrink)

Sometimes, scientific models are either intended to or plausibly interpreted as representing nonactual but possible targets. Call this “hypothetical modeling”. This paper raises two epistemological challenges concerning hypothetical modeling. To begin with, I observe that given common philosophical assumptions about the scope of objective possibility, hypothetical models are fallible with respect to what is objectively possible. There is thus a need to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate hypothetical modeling. The first epistemological challenge is that no account of the epistemology of (...) hypothetical models seems to cohere with the most characteristic function of scientific modeling in general, i.e., surrogative representation. The second epistemological challenge is a version of “reliability challenges” familiar from other areas. There is a challenge to explain how hypothetical models could be a reliable guide to what is possible, given that they are not and cannot be compared against their nonactual targets and updated accordingly. I close with some brief remarks on possible solutions to these challenges. (shrink)

Generic statements play a crucial role in concept learning, communication and education. Despite many efforts, the semantics of generics remain a controversial issue, as they do not seem to fit our standard theories of meaning. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this problem by focusing on how these sentences function in reasoning. Drawing on a distinction between property and diagnostic generics, we defend three theses: First, property generics are not about facts but express relations between concepts. Second, (...) generics play an important role in everyday reasoning by interacting with our expectations about the world. Third, diagnostic generics emphasise properties that separate the category in the generics from other categories in the same contrast class. We use the theory of conceptual spaces to advance measures of typicality and diagnosticity capable of modelling different aspects of generics and apply them to the modifier effect and the inverse conjunction fallacy. Finally, we discuss the pragmatics of generics. (shrink)