Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

For Martin, the right to free higher education may be claimed only by those ready and willing pursue autonomy supporting higher education. The unready and unwilling, among whom may be counted carers, disabled, and devout, are excluded. This is unjust. I argue that this injustice follows from a tension between three elements of Martin’s argument: (1) a universal right to autonomy supporting higher education; (2) qualifications on entitlements to access this right in order to preserve the value of (...) higher educational goods; (3) luck egalitarian motivations in Martin’s distributive ethics. I consider options for avoiding such injustices and their implications for Martin’s argument. (shrink)

I explore several issues raised in John Martin Fischer’s Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. First I discuss whether an approach to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge that appeals directly to the claim that God’s beliefs depend on the future is importantly different from Ockhamism. I suggest that this dependence approach has advantages over Ockhamism. I also argue that this approach gives us good reason to reject the claim that the past is fixed. Finally, I discuss (...) Fischer’s proposal regarding God’s knowledge of future contingents. I suggest that it may be able to secure comprehensive foreknowledge. (shrink)

This article draws on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany in critically assessing the efficacy of reasonableness in advancing the aims of emancipatory politics in political discourse. I argue, through a reading of Douglass and Delany, that comporting oneself reasonably in the face of oppressive ideology can be counterproductive, if one’s aim is to undermine such ideology and the institutions it supports. Douglass and Delany, I argue, also provide us with a framework for (...) evaluating alternative discursive strategies we might wish to employ in light of the limited value of reasonableness for emancipatory politics. (shrink)

Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally responsible only if she is (...) appropriately receptive to and reactive to reasons for action. Building on this, we claim that the degree to which an agent is responsible will depend on the degree to which she is able to recognize and react to reasons. To analyze this, we appeal to relations of comparative similarity between possible worlds, arguing that the degree to which an agent is reasons-reactive depends on the nearest possible world in which given sufficient reason to do otherwise, she does so. Similarly, we argue that the degree to which an agent is reasons-receptive will depend on the intelligibility of her patterned recognition of reasons. By extending an account of reasons-responsiveness in these ways, we are able to rationalize our practice of judging people to be more or less responsible. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity(DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. This (...) subversion of academia ― disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy ― is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. -/- Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. -/- List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Erik. J. Olsson, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

Interest in idealism has increased substantially since the publication of Sprigge’s Vindication of Absolute Idealism in 1984,1 and again with more vigor over the last decade in the context of the mind-body problem and panpsychism. This will probably not come as a surprise to objective idealists, among which Vittorio Hosle has proposed that philosophy cycles through stages with some form of idealism as end point of each cycle.2 More recently, David Chalmers mused about a corresponding development in the worldview of (...) single individuals from materialism over dualism and panpsychism to idealism.3 Traditional accounts of idealism include for instance those of Plato, Plotinus, Leibniz, Berkeley, or Hegel. An overview of contemporary approaches is given in the article by Chalmers, where he mentions amongst others a recent collection of essays on idealism,4 but also for instance the (recently extended5) works of Philip Goff on Russellian monism.6 A more classically oriented collection of works on idealism was edited by Hosle and Suarez Muller.7 In his article ‘Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem’, David Chalmers presents a classification of possible versions of idealism with the goal of assessing the prospects of idealism in the context of the mind-body problem without having to pay too much attention to its ‘historical baggage’. This goal seems to me highly laudable and the resulting classification an important contribution to the contemporay discussion. In addition, the conclusions drawn from the subsequent analysis seem very plausible from the viewpoints of dualistic, panpsychistic and similar thinking. I nevertheless believe that the presented classification is not really adequate to capture the core of traditional idealistic thinking, which in turn leads to somewhat distorted conclusions about the opportunities for idealism to play a role for understanding the mind-body problem: First, the distinction between micro- macro- and cosmic idealism ist not fitting well into the idealistic venture. Instead, idealism is artificially reduced to a bad alternative to panpsychism. Secondly, the initially mentioned, but afterwards not discussed again difference between subjectinvolving and non-subject-involving idealism needs to be further extended, to account for the special role of subjects in traditional accounts of objective idealism. To elaborate on this, I will first give a short summary of Chalmers classification and some of the mentioned problems with idealism. Afterwards I will come back to my two objections in more detail. (shrink)

Several scholars, including Martin Hengel, R. Alan Culpepper, and Richard Bauckham, have argued that Papias had knowledge of the Gospel of John on the grounds that Papias’s prologue lists six of Jesus’s disciples in the same order that they are named in the Gospel of John: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, and John. In “A Note on Papias’s Knowledge of the Fourth Gospel” (JBL 129 [2010]: 793–794), Jake H. O’Connell presents a statistical analysis of this argument, according to (...) which the probability of this correspondence occurring by chance is lower than 1%. O’Connell concludes that it is more than 99% probable that this correspondence is the result of Papias copying John, rather than chance. I show that O’Connell’s analysis contains multiple mistakes, both substantive and mathematical: it ignores relevant evidence, overstates the correspondence between John and Papias, wrongly assumes that if Papias did not know John he ordered the disciples randomly, and conflates the probability of A given B with the probability of B given A. In discussing these errors, I aim to inform both Johannine scholarship and the use of probabilistic methods in historical reasoning. (shrink)

This book chapter shows how the early Heidegger’s philosophy around the period of Being and Time can address some central questions of contemporary social ontology. After sketching “non-summative constructionism”, which is arguably the generic framework that underlies all forms of contemporary analytic social ontology, I lay out early Heidegger’s conception of human social reality in terms of an extended argument. The Heidegger that shows up in light of this treatment is an acute phenomenologist of human social existence who emphasizes our (...) engagement in norm-governed practices as the basis of social reality. I then defuse a common and understandable set of objections against invoking the early Heidegger as someone who can make any positive contribution to our understanding of social reality. Lastly, I explore the extent to which the early Heidegger’s philosophy provides insights regarding phenomena of collective intentionality by showing how the intelligibility of such phenomena traces back to individual agents’ common understanding of possible ways of understanding things and acting with one another. With the early Heidegger, I argue that this common understanding is the fundamental source and basis of collective intentionality, not the non-summativist constructionism on which contemporary analytic social ontology has sought to focus with much effort. The lesson about social ontology that we should learn from the early Heidegger is that there is a tight connection between the social constitution of the human individual and his or her capacity to perform actions or activities that instantiate collective intentionality. (shrink)

Review of *New Essays on the A Priori*, an excellent collection edited by Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke. Contributors include: Tyler Burge; Quassim Cassam; Philip Kitcher; Penelope Maddy; Hartry Field; Paul Horwich; Peter Railton; Stephen Yablo; Bob Hale; Crispin Wright; Frank Jackson; Stewart Shapiro; Michael Friedman; Martin Davies; Bill Brewer; and Thomas Nagel.

Book synopsis This book is devoted to the condition of the university under the pressures of globalization, with particular reference to Central Europe. It is intended as a companion volume for all those who combine their academic and disciplinary research with wider interests in the functioning of higher education institutions under the new pressures affecting Central Europe. Drawing on its interdisciplinary nature and the wide range of scholars involved, it intends to outline a useful map of new, often challenging, areas, (...) topics and concerns to be taken into account in rethinking the function of the university today. -/- Contents Contents: Philip G. Altbach: Academic Freedom: International Realities and Challenges - Richard Rorty: Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions? - Stanley N. Katz: Can Liberal Education Cope? - Marek Kwiek: The State, the Market, and Higher Education. Challenges for the New Century - Roger Deacon/Ben Parker: The Schooling of Citizens, or the Civilizing of Society? - Tadeusz Buksinski: The University and Learning in a Situation of Depression - Martin Jay: The Menace of Consilience: Keeping the Disciplines Unreconciled - Voldemar Tomusk: Towards a Model of Higher Education Reform in Central and East Europe - Wolf Lepenies: Im Osten viel Neues. Wissenschafts- und Kulturpolitik für Europa - Zbigniew Drozdowicz: Academic Accreditation: a Polish Case Study - Marek Kwiek: The Nation-State, Globalization and the Modern Institution of the University. (shrink)

Dialogue between feminist and mainstream philosophy of science has been limited in recent years, although feminist and mainstream traditions each have engaged in rich debates about key concepts and their efficacy. Noteworthy criticisms of concepts like objectivity, consensus, justification, and discovery can be found in the work of philosophers of science including Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, Peter Galison, Alison Wylie, Lorraine Daston, and Sandra Harding. As a graduate student in philosophy of science who worked in both literatures, I was (...) often left with the feeling that I had joined a broken family with two warring factions. This is apparent in the number of anthologies that have emerged on both sides in the aftermath of the “Science Wars” (Gross, Paul R., Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis, eds. 1996; Koertge, Noretta, ed. 1998; Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. 1998; etc.) Depending on one’s perspective on the Science Wars, the breadth of illustrative cases and examples found in Science and Other Cultures can either give more ammunition for the battle, or grounding for a much needed treaty of accord. The most important feature of this book is that it does not merely claim that science is only political, and it does not merely dismiss science as a social phenomenon to be deconstructed using the standard postmodern conceptual tools. Instead, the collection illustrates ways in which postcolonial analysis and multicultural examples can enrich our understanding of “good” science and ethics. Here, the concept of “strong objectivity” from Harding’s earlier books is fleshed out through a variety of cases. The anthology is the culmination of a series of research activities funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the American Philosophical Association. The grant, under the auspices of the NSF Ethics and Values Program, sponsored fourteen summer research projects and thirty-six presentations at four regional APA meetings. (shrink)

Having a self means being able think of myself under a certain profile that that is me: that is who I am, that is how I am. But if I raise the question as to who or how I am, there are three salient profiles in which I can cast myself, three selves with which we can identify. I can see myself just as an agent identified over time by the linkages between my experiences, my attitudes and my actions. I (...) can see myself as the persona that I invite others to rely on and that, if sincere, I internalize. And I can see myself as the figure I cut in other people's eyes, whether or not I welcome that image. Such ambiguities help explain the complexity in philosophical discussion of the self as well as the conflict in everyday exhortations to be ourselves and know ourselves, yet also to forget ourselves and lose ourselves. (shrink)

A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...) to reasons, and it is compatible with a subjective awareness of the available options. (shrink)

It is great honor to be even a virtual part of an event to celebrate the work of Leslie Zines, and especially to celebrate it in such august company. Leslie was a colleague that I greatly admired and liked. The disciplinary divide between us was not any bar to affection, though Leslie never let me forget that the constitutional-law terrain was sacred ground on which outsiders ventured at their peril. I particularly enjoyed the way that he, like our mutual, recently (...) departed friend, Paul Finn, gently mocked the pretensions of a philosopher to declaim on topics jurisprudential. I fear I’m going to tread on his ground again in this little paper and I can only beg his, and Paul’s, posthumous indulgence. My topic is the dispersion of power within the state. This ideal has a long history but has ceased to be much celebrated by those who endorse it and has come in for fierce attack among populist opponents. It’s not an exaggeration to say, in Yeats’s words, that on this subject ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity’. In this short paper I would like to rehearse reasons why we should warmly endorse the dispersive ideal. And endorse it, regardless of how we dub it: whether, for example, we describe it in a mainly twentieth-century formula, as the separation of powers; in an eighteenth-century antecedent as a regime of checks and balances; in an earlier name that goes back to the Roman Republic as a mixed constitution; or in a term I myself favor as a polycentric arrangement or system. (shrink)

Both Philip and Andrew are philosophy students whose interests converge around the philosophy of technology broadly understood. Philip's interest is specifically aimed toward the ethics of Transhumanism and depictions of Transhumanism in works of fiction. On the other hand, Andrew finds himself more focused on religious behavior in the technological world. While the two perspectives might not seem that close, there is certain to be an overlap in Andrew and Philip's shared understanding of how technological phenomena play (...) a crucial role concerning religion and society. (shrink)

Russellianism is the view that the meaning of a proper name is the individual designated by the name. Together with other plausible assumptions, Russellianism entails the following: Sentences containing proper names express Russellian propositions, which involve the individual designated by the name as a direct constituent, and which can be represented as sets of individuals and properties. Moreover, as they occur in ordinary belief reports, ‘that’-clauses designate Russellian propositions. Such belief reports are true if and only if the subject of (...) the belief report bears the belief relation to the proposition designated by the ‘that’-clause. In defending this doctrine, some Russellians appeal to propositional guises, which, roughly speaking, are ways of grasping propositions. However, some Russellians don’t appeal to such entities. In this paper, I explain the varieties of Russellianism and then argue for Modest Russellianism: Believing a Russellian proposition is essentially mediated by guises, so that an agent can’t believe a Russellian proposition without standing in some appropriate relation to both the proposition and a guise. Nonetheless, guises don’t feature in the semantics of ordinary belief reports, so that an adequate account of the meaning of such belief reports needn’t invoke guises. (shrink)

Suppose we embrace the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination: freedom as immunity to arbitrary interference. In that case those acts that call uncontroversially for criminalization will usually be objectionable on three grounds: the offender assumes a dominating position in relation to the victim, the offender reduces the range or ease of undominated choice on the part of the victim, and the offender raises a spectre of domination for others like the victim. And in that case, so it appears, the (...) obvious role for punishment will be, so far as possible, to undo such evils: to rectify the effects of the crime that make it a repugnant republican act. This paper explores this theory of punishment as rectification, contrasting it with better established utilitarian and retributivist approaches. (shrink)

This paper sets out an account of trust in AI as a relationship between clinicians, AI applications, and AI practitioners in which AI is given discretionary authority over medical questions by clinicians. Compared to other accounts in recent literature, this account more adequately explains the normative commitments created by practitioners when inviting clinicians’ trust in AI. To avoid committing to an account of trust in AI applications themselves, I sketch a reductive view on which discretionary authority is exercised by AI (...) practitioners through the vehicle of an AI application. I conclude with four critical questions based on the discretionary account to determine if trust in particular AI applications is sound, and a brief discussion of the possibility that the main roles of the physician could be replaced by AI. (shrink)

We introduce the topic of panpsychism, before briefly outlining the 19 essays on panpsychism containing in this special issue.

I show that Wittgenstein's critique of G.H. Hardy's mathematical realism naturally extends to Paul Benacerraf's influential paper, ‘Mathematical Truth’. Wittgenstein accuses Hardy of hastily analogizing mathematical and empirical propositions, thus leading to a picture of mathematical reality that is somehow akin to empirical reality despite the many puzzles this creates. Since Benacerraf relies on that very same analogy to raise problems about mathematical ‘truth’ and the alleged ‘reality’ to which it corresponds, his major argument falls prey to the same critique. (...) The problematic pictures of mathematical reality suggested by Hardy and Benacerraf can be avoided, according to Wittgenstein, by disrupting the analogy that gives rise to them. I show why Tarskian updates to our conception of ‘truth’ discussed by Benacerraf do not answer Wittgenstein's concerns. That is, because they merely presuppose what Wittgenstein puts into question, namely, the essential uniformity of ‘truth’ and ‘proposition’ in ordinary discourse. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.

In PI 189, Wittgenstein's interlocutor asks, ‘But are the steps then not determined by the algebraic formula?’. Wittgenstein responds, ‘The question contains a mistake’. What is the mistake contained in the interlocutor's question? Wittgenstein's elaboration is neither explicit nor its intended upshot transparent. In this paper, I offer a reading on which the interlocutor's question arises from illicitly crossing different pictures of ‘determination’. I begin by working through Wittgenstein's machine analogy in PI 193, which illustrates picture‐crossing in our ways of (...) talking about a machine. Using the lessons from this analogy, I show how the interlocutor's ‘mistake’ can be diagnosed in similar terms: their confusion about the power of a rule to determine its applications rests on mistakenly crossing a behavioural and a mathematical sense of ‘determine’—thereby concocting a mystifying picture of rule‐following. (shrink)

Many have offered accounts of the procreative asymmetry, the claim that one has no moral reason to create a life just because it would be happy, but one has moral reason not to create a life just because it would be miserable. I suggest a new approach. Instead of looking at the procreative asymmetry on its own, we can situate it within a broader landscape of asymmetries. Specifically, there are two other analogous asymmetries in the prudential and epistemic domains. The (...) prudential asymmetry says that one has no prudential reason to acquire a desire just because it would be satisfied, but one has prudential reason not to acquire a desire just because it would be frustrated. The epistemic asymmetry says that one has no epistemic reason to acquire a belief just because it is true, but one has epistemic reason not to acquire a belief just because it is false. The existence of these analogous asymmetries in these normative domains suggests the possibility of a unified account of all three asymmetries as instances of a more fundamental asymmetry of value-based reasons. This paper develops a working model of what such a unified account might look like. Such an account can give us a unified explanation of a variety of phenomena, reinforce the plausibility of each of these asymmetries, and give us a novel picture of how value gives us reasons that might extend beyond these three applications. (shrink)

There are a number of assumptions made in our accepted psychology of moral decision-making that consequentialism seems to violate:: value connectionism, pluralism and dispositionalism. But consequentialism violates them only on a utilitarian or similar theory of value, not on the rival sort of theory that is sketched here.

This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker (2013), moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the Harm Account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others’ moral obligations. On the Qualified Harm Account, there is (...) no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is “for the best” in historical perspective, or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker’s historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain. (shrink)

Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Non-cognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls Non-Inferential Weak Cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders.

This paper has two goals: (1) to defend a particular response to the problem of resultant moral luck and (2) to defend the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. Cases of overdetermination threaten to undermine the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. To deal with this issue, I will motivate a particular way of responding to the problem of resultant moral luck. I defend the view that one's degree (...) of responsibility is immune to moral luck but the scope of events for which one is responsible is subject to moral luck. I will then argue that this view allows us to explain away certain intuitions about responsibility and overdetermination (as well as similar intuitions regarding Frankfurt Cases). As a result, the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided becomes significantly more plausible. (shrink)

A theory of the first-person plural occupies a unique place in philosophical investigations into intersubjectivity and social cognition. In order for the referent of the first-person plural—“the We”—to come into existence, it seems there must be a shared ground of communicative possibility, but this requires a non-circular explanation of how this ground could be shared in the absence of a pre-existing context of communicative conventions. Margaret Gilbert’s and John Searle’s theories of collective intentionality capture important aspects of the We, but (...) fail to fully account for this shared ground of communicative possibility. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeity helps reconcile the positive aspects of these accounts while also explaining how the genesis of the social world is continuous with perceptual life in general. This enables an account of the first-person plural as dependent on reciprocal communicative interaction without the need to posit a primitive or primordial “we-mode” of consciousness. “Intercorporeity” designates a bodily openness to others that is not fundamentally different in kind from the general style of bodily comportment found in Merleau-Ponty’s rich analyses of perceptual life. (shrink)

Engineers are traditionally regarded as trustworthy professionals who meet exacting standards. In this chapter I begin by explicating our trust relationship towards engineers, arguing that it is a linear but indirect relationship in which engineers “stand behind” the artifacts and technological systems that we rely on directly. The chapter goes on to explain how this relationship has become more complex as engineers have taken on two additional aims: the aim of social engineering to create and steer trust between people, and (...) the aim of creating automated systems that take over human tasks and are meant to invite the trust of those who rely on and interact with them. (shrink)

Strong claims have been made for emergence as a new paradigm for understanding science, consciousness, and religion. Tracing the past history and current definitions of the concept, Clayton assesses the case for emergent phenomena in the natural world and their significance for philosophy and theology. Complex emergent phenomena require irreducible levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology. This pattern of emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof of (...) a mental substance or soul. Although emergence does not entail classical theism, it is compatible with a variety of religious positions. Clayton concludes with a defence of emergentist panentheism and a Christian constructive theology consistent with the new sciences of emergence. (shrink)

The article presents a pluralistic model of value change, emphasizing the interplay between technology and societal values. It critiques the Simple Change Model, which suggests a uniform transition from one dominant value scheme to another, arguing instead for emergent and differential value change. Emergent value change occurs when new values arise within specific contexts without displacing existing ones, often influenced by generational experiences with technology and niches where new technologies are introduced. Differential value change highlights how distinct groups may adopt (...) different value schemes based on their unique contexts and experiences, sometimes leading to societal polarization and the need to reconcile incompatible value schemes. The article stresses the importance of individual experiences of ethical uncertainty and disruption in understanding these changes. By integrating these complexities, the model offers a rich, non-deterministic framework for analyzing how values evolve in response to technological advancements. (shrink)

With respect to the metaphysics of infinity, the tendency of standard debates is to either endorse or to deny the reality of ‘the infinite’. But how should we understand the notion of ‘reality’ employed in stating these options? Wittgenstein’s critical strategy shows that the notion is grounded in a confusion: talk of infinity naturally takes hold of one’s imagination due to the sway of verbal pictures and analogies suggested by our words. This is the source of various philosophical pictures that (...) in turn give rise to the standard metaphysical debates: that the mathematics of infinity corresponds to a special realm of infinite objects, that the infinite is profoundly huge or vast, or that the ability to think about infinity reveals mysterious powers in human beings. First, I explain Wittgenstein’s general strategy for undermining philosophical pictures of ‘the infinite’ – as he describes it in Zettel; and then show how that critical strategy is applied to Cantor’s diagonalization proof in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics II. (shrink)

Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009).

Group agency requires a number of people to combine in pursuit of shared goals across varied scenarios. Thus, a group or corporate agent must be organized (1) to act flexibly as its goals require, (2) with the intentional, if not always voluntary, acquiescence of members in the guidance of (3) an authorized spokesperson or (4) a constructed voice, thereby (5) becoming capable of making and honoring commitments.