In this article, we explore the implications of opposing domains theory for developing ethical leaders. Opposing domains theory highlights a neurological tension between analytic reasoning and socioemotional reasoning. Specifically, when we engage in analytic reasoning, we suppress our ability to engage in socioemotional reasoning and vice versa. In this article, we bring together the domains of neuroscience, psychology, and ethics, to inform our theorizing around ethical leadership. We propose that a key issue for ethical leadership is achieving a healthy balance (...) between analytic reasoning and socioemotional reasoning. We argue that organizational culture often encourages too heavy a reliance on nonemotional forms of reasoning to arrive at moral judgments. As a result, leaders run the risk of suppressing their ability to pay attention to the human side of moral dilemmas and, in doing so, dehumanize colleagues, particularly subordinates, and clients. (shrink)

Nietzsche announces his intentions to publish a “physiology of aesthetics”, namely a naturalistic explanation for how aesthetic judgements are grounded in the physiology of both the one experiencing the work, and the creator of it. But as well as the physiological reduction of aesthetic judgements, Nietzsche in many places across his oeuvre frames the apparatus of physiology, especially the prescriptive dimension of self-cultivation, in terms amenable to being treated as ‘aesthetic’. The first section will mount a (re-) defense of the (...) use of aestheticized language for discussing Nietzschean self-cultivation. The second section demonstrates an aesthetic evaluation of capacities that make possible the acquisition and removal of instinctual components, ultimately arguing for Nietzsche’s qualified indeterminism regarding the capacity for self-cultivation. The third section will assess the pres- ence of another aesthetic measure, this time in terms of envisaging one’s psycho-physiology by reference to an external spectacle. The final section discusses metaethical questions stemming from Nietzsche’s prescriptive language regarding the aestheticization of our physiology. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

This paper applies a virtue epistemology approach to using the Internet, as to improve our information-seeking behaviours. Virtue epistemology focusses on the cognitive character of agents and is less concerned with the nature of truth and epistemic justification as compared to traditional analytic epistemology. Due to this focus on cognitive character and agency, it is a fruitful but underexplored approach to using the Internet in an epistemically desirable way. Thus, the central question in this paper is: How to use the (...) Internet in an epistemically virtuous way? Using the work of Jason Baehr, it starts by outlining nine intellectual or epistemic virtues: curiosity, intellectual autonomy, intellectual humility, attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, intellectual thoroughness, open-mindedness, intellectual courage and intellectual tenacity. It then explores how we should deploy these virtues and avoid the corresponding vices when interacting with the Internet, particularly search engines. Whilst an epistemically virtuous use of the Internet will not guarantee that one will acquire true beliefs, understanding or even knowledge, it will strongly improve one’s information-seeking behaviours. The paper ends with arguing that teaching and assessing online intellectual virtues should be part of school and university curricula, perhaps embedded in critical thinking courses, or even better, as individual units. (shrink)

We present a general framework for representing belief-revision rules and use it to characterize Bayes's rule as a classical example and Jeffrey's rule as a non-classical one. In Jeffrey's rule, the input to a belief revision is not simply the information that some event has occurred, as in Bayes's rule, but a new assignment of probabilities to some events. Despite their differences, Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules can be characterized in terms of the same axioms: "responsiveness", which requires that revised beliefs (...) incorporate what has been learnt, and "conservativeness", which requires that beliefs on which the learnt input is "silent" do not change. To illustrate the use of non-Bayesian belief revision in economic theory, we sketch a simple decision-theoretic application. (shrink)

A general class of labeled sequent calculi is investigated, and necessary and sufficient conditions are given for when such a calculus is sound and complete for a finite -valued logic if the labels are interpreted as sets of truth values. Furthermore, it is shown that any finite -valued logic can be given an axiomatization by such a labeled calculus using arbitrary "systems of signs," i.e., of sets of truth values, as labels. The number of labels needed is logarithmic in the (...) number of truth values, and it is shown that this bound is tight. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

We present an ontology of pain and of other pain-related phenomena, building on the definition of pain provided by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Our strategy is to identify an evolutionarily basic canonical pain phenomenon, involving unpleasant sensory and emotional experience based causally in localized tissue damage that is concordant with that experience. We then show how different variant cases of this canonical pain phenomenon can be distinguished, including pain that is elevated relative to peripheral trauma, (...) pain that is caused neuropathically (thus with no necessary peripheral stimulus), and pain reports arising through deception either of self or of others. We describe how our approach can answer some of the objections raised against the IASP definition, and sketch how it can be used to support more sophisticated discrimination of different types of pain resulting in improved data analysis that can help in advancing pain research. (shrink)

Memory technologies are cultural artifacts that scaffold, transform, and are interwoven with human biological memory systems. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and integrative survey of their philosophical dimensions, including their metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dimensions, drawing together debates across the humanities, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. Metaphysical dimensions of memory technologies include their function, the nature of their informational properties, ways of classifying them, and their ontological status. Epistemological dimensions include the truth-conduciveness of external memory, (...) the conditions under which external memory counts as knowledge, and the metacognitive monitoring of external memory processes. And lastly, ethical and normative dimensions include the desirability of the effects memory technologies have on biological memory, their effects on self and culture, and their moral status. Whilst the focus in the article is largely philosophical and conceptual, empirical issues such as the way we interact with memory technologies in various contexts are also discussed. We thus take a naturalistic approach in which philosophical and empirical concepts and approaches are seen as continuous. (shrink)

Investigation of neural and cognitive processes underlying individual variation in moral preferences is underway, with notable similarities emerging between moral- and risk-based decision-making. Here we specifically assessed moral distributive justice preferences and non-moral financial gambling preferences in the same individuals, and report an association between these seemingly disparate forms of decision-making. Moreover, we find this association between distributive justice and risky decision-making exists primarily when the latter is assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task. These findings are consistent with neuroimaging studies (...) of brain function during moral and risky decision-making. This research also constitutes the first replication of a novel experimental measure of distributive justice decision-making, for which individual variation in performance was found. Further examination of decision-making processes across different contexts may lead to an improved understanding of the factors affecting moral behaviour. (shrink)

Extended and distributed cognition theories argue that human cognitive systems sometimes include non-biological objects. On these views, the physical supervenience base of cognitive systems is thus not the biological brain or even the embodied organism, but an organism-plus-artifacts. In this paper, we provide a novel account of the implications of these views for learning, education, and assessment. We start by conceptualising how we learn to assemble extended cognitive systems by internalising cultural norms and practices. Having a better grip on how (...) extended cognitive systems are assembled, we focus on the question: If our cognition extends, how should we educate and assess such extended cognitive systems? We suggest various ways to minimize possible negative effects of extending one’s cognition and to efficiently find and organise (online) information by adopting a virtue epistemology approach. Educational and assessment implications are foregrounded, particularly in the case of Danish students’ use of the Internet during exams. (shrink)

Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.

Frege begins his discussion of factives in ‘On Sense and Reference’ with an example of a purported contrafactive, that is, a verb that entails, or presupposes, the falsity of the complement sentence. But the verb he cites, ‘wähnen’, is now obsolete, and native speakers are sceptical about whether it really was a contrafactive. Despite the profusion of factive verbs, there are no clear examples of contrafactive propositional attitude verbs in English, French or German. This paper attempts to give an explanation (...) of this, and to use this to shed light on the behaviour of factives more generally. The suggestion is that factive propositional attitude verbs take facts, not propositions, as the referents of their complement sentences; and that as there are no contra-facts, there can be no contra-factives. This claim is also used to help explain Timothy Williamson's observation that there is no stative propositional attitude factive that requires only belief. Various conclusions are drawn within a broadly ‘knowledge first’ approach. (shrink)

to appear in Lambert, E. and J. Schwenkler (eds.) Transformative Experience (OUP) -/- L. A. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that the possibility of epistemically transformative experiences poses serious and novel problems for the orthodox theory of rational choice, namely, expected utility theory — I call her argument the Utility Ignorance Objection. In a pair of earlier papers, I responded to Paul’s challenge (Pettigrew 2015, 2016), and a number of other philosophers have responded in similar ways (Dougherty, et al. 2015, Harman (...) 2015) — I call our argument the Fine-Graining Response. Paul has her own reply to this response, which we might call the Authenticity Reply. But Sarah Moss has recently offered an alternative reply to the Fine-Graining Response on Paul’s behalf (Moss 2017) — we’ll call it the No Knowledge Reply. This appeals to the knowledge norm of action, together with Moss’ novel and intriguing account of probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, I consider Moss’ reply and argue that it fails. I argue first that it fails as a reply made on Paul’s behalf, since it forces us to abandon many of the features of Paul’s challenge that make it distinctive and with which Paul herself is particularly concerned. Then I argue that it fails as a reply independent of its fidelity to Paul’s intentions. (shrink)

An investigation of what Frege means by his doctrine that functions (and so concepts) are 'unsaturated'. We argue that this doctrine is far less peculiar than it is usually taken to be. What makes it hard to understand, oddly enough, is the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our contemporary understanding of logic and language. To see this, we look at how it emerges out of Frege's confrontation with the Booleans and how it expresses a fundamental difference between (...) Frege's approach to logic and theirs. (shrink)

Public health is concerned with increasing the health of the community at whole. Insofar as health is a ‘good’ and the community constitutes a ‘public’, public health by definition promotes a ‘public good’. But ‘public good’ has a particular and much more narrow meaning in the economics literature, and some commentators have tried to limit the scope of public health to this more narrow meaning of a ‘public good’. While such a move makes the content of public health less controversial, (...) it also strips important goals from the realm of public health, goals that traditionally have been, and morally should be, a part of it. Instead, I will argue, while public health should be defined by public goods, it should be defined by a broader conception of public goods that I shall call ‘normative public goods’, goods that ought to be treated as if they were public goods in the more narrow sense. (shrink)

Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly should not, (...) play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the questioning attitude of wondering and a class of attitudes I call 'epistemic desires'. Broadly, these are desires to improve one's epistemic position on some question. A common example is the attitude of wanting to know the answer to some question. I argue that one can have any kind of epistemic desire towards any question, Q, without necessarily wondering Q, but not conversely. That is, one cannot wonder Q without having at least some epistemic (...) desire directed towards Q. I defend this latter claim from apparent counterexamples due to Friedman (2013) and Drucker (2022), and finish with a proposal on which epistemic desires, particularly the desire for understanding, play an explanatory role in distinguishing wondering from other forms of question-directed thought. (shrink)

How should a machine intelligence perform unsupervised structure discovery over streams of sensory input? One approach to this problem is to cast it as an apperception task [1]. Here, the task is to construct an explicit interpretable theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions, designed to ensure that the constituents of the theory are connected in a relational structure. However, the original formulation of the apperception task had one fundamental limitation: it assumed (...) the raw sensory input had already been parsed using a set of discrete categories, so that all the system had to do was receive this already-digested symbolic input, and make sense of it. But what if we don't have access to pre-parsed input? What if our sensory sequence is raw unprocessed information? The central contribution of this paper is a neuro-symbolic framework for distilling interpretable theories out of streams of raw, unprocessed sensory experience. First, we extend the definition of the apperception task to include ambiguous (but still symbolic) input: sequences of sets of disjunctions. Next, we use a neural network to map raw sensory input to disjunctive input. Our binary neural network is encoded as a logic program, so the weights of the network and the rules of the theory can be solved jointly as a single SAT problem. This way, we are able to jointly learn how to perceive (mapping raw sensory information to concepts) and apperceive (combining concepts into declarative rules). (shrink)

This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. (...) For most users, current LLMs are black boxes, i.e., for the most part, they lack data transparency and algorithmic transparency. They can, however, be phenomenologically and informationally transparent, in which case there is an interactional flow. Anthropomorphising and interactional flow can, in some users, create an attitude of (unwarranted) trust towards the output LLMs generate. We conclude this paper by drawing on the epistemology of trust and testimony to examine the epistemic implications of these dimensions. Whilst LLMs generally generate accurate responses, we observe two epistemic pitfalls. Ideally, users should be able to match the level of trust that they place in LLMs to the degree that LLMs are trustworthy. However, both their data and algorithmic opacity and their phenomenological and informational transparency can make it difficult for users to calibrate their trust correctly. The effects of these limitations are twofold: users may adopt unwarranted attitudes of trust towards the outputs of LLMs (which is particularly problematic when LLMs hallucinate), and the trustworthiness of LLMs may be undermined. (shrink)

How should your opinion change in light of an epistemic peer's? We show that the pooling rule known as "upco" is the unique answer satisfying some natural desiderata. If your revised opinion will impact your other views by Jeffrey conditionalization, then upco is the only standard pooling rule that ensures the order in which peers are consulted makes no difference. Popular alternatives like linear pooling, geometric pooling, and harmonic pooling cannot boast the same. In fact, no alternative can that possesses (...) four minimal properties these proposals all share. (shrink)

What we value, like, endorse, want, and prefer changes over the course of our lives. Richard Pettigrew presents a theory of rational decision making for agents who recognise that their values will change over time and whose decisions will affect those future times.

La cobertura universal de salud está en el centro de la acción actual para fortalecer los sistemas de salud y mejorar el nivel y la distribución de la salud y los servicios de salud. Este documento es el informe fi nal del Grupo Consultivo de la OMS sobre la Equidad y Cobertura Universal de Salud. Aquí se abordan los temas clave de la justicia (fairness) y la equidad que surgen en el camino hacia la cobertura universal de salud. Por lo (...) tanto, el informe es pertinente para cada agente que infl uye en ese camino y en particular para los gobiernos, ya que se encargan de supervisar y guiar el progreso hacia la cobertura universal de salud. (shrink)

Frege held that referring expressions in general, and demonstratives and indexicals in particular, contribute more than just their reference to what is expressed by utterances of sentences containing them. Heck first attempts to get clear about what the essence of the Fregean view is, arguing that it rests upon a certain conception of linguistic communication that is ultimately indefensible. On the other hand, however, he argues that understanding a demonstrative (or indexical) utterance requires one to think of the object denoted (...) in an appropriate way. This fact makes it difficult to reconcile the view that referring expressions are "directly referential" with any view that seeks (as Grice's does) to ground meaning in facts about communication. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. (...) We end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

This Element, written for researchers and students in philosophy and the behavioral sciences, reviews and critically assesses extant work on number concepts in developmental psychology and cognitive science. It has four main aims. First, it characterizes the core commitments of mainstream number cognition research, including the commitment to representationalism, the hypothesis that there exist certain number-specific cognitive systems, and the key milestones in the development of number cognition. Second, it provides a taxonomy of influential views within mainstream number cognition research, (...) along with the central challenges these views face. Third, it identifies and critically assesses a series of core philosophical assumptions often adopted by number cognition researchers. Finally, the Element articulates and defends a novel version of pluralism about number concepts. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to identify the wrong that is done in all cases of testimonial injustice, if there is one. Miranda Fricker (2007) proposes one account of this distinctive wrong, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (2014) offers another. I think neither works. Nor does an account based on giving due respect to the testifier's epistemic competence. Nor does an account based on exposing the testifier to substantial risk of harm. Rachel Fraser (2023) describes a further account, and the (...) proposal I favour is a slight amendment of this. (shrink)

This paper investigates a set of issues connected with the so-called conservativeness argument against deflationism. Although I do not defend that argument, I think the discussion of it has raised some interesting questions about whether what I call “compositional principles,” such as “a conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true,” have substantial content or are in some sense logically trivial. The paper presents a series of results that purport to show that the compositional principles for a first-order language, taken (...) together, have substantial logical strength, amounting to a kind of abstract consistency statement. (shrink)

A logically impossible sentence is one which entails a contradiction, a logically necessary sentence is one whose negation entails a contradiction, and a logically possible sentence is one which does not entail a contradiction. Metaphysically impossible, necessary and possible sentences are ones which become logically impossible, necessary, or possible by substituting what I call informative rigid designators for uninformative ones. It does seem very strongly that a negative existential sentence cannot entail a contradiction, and so ”there is a God’ cannot (...) be a metaphysically necessary truth. If it were such a truth, innumerable other sentences which seem paradigm examples of logically possible sentences, such as ”no one knows everything’ would turn out to be logically impossible. The only way in which God could be a logically necessary being is if there were eternal necessary propositions independent of human language or God’s will, such that the proposition that there is no God would entail -- via propositions inaccessible to us -- a contradiction. But if there were such propositions, God would have less control over the universe than he would have otherwise. (shrink)

This work is the transcript of a theological dialogue I had with ChatGPT that spanned a couple of days. I began it merely out of curiosity over how ChatGPT might respond to questions and challenges I posed. As it progressed, I became increasingly impressed with the nuance, depth, and relevance of its responses. The dialogue became, for me, something of a contemplative exercise. I still don’t know quite how to understand the ability of generative A.I. to respond with such (apparent) (...) understanding and even insight. -/- I’ve decided to post this dialogue, not only because of the puzzle it poses concerning A.I, but even more, because I believe that the theological conclusions ‘we’ arrived at have real merit. -/- In the end, the theological views expressed here echo those that I’ve expressed in other works of mine, but the expression of these views are enhanced by the way ChatGPT picks up on them, rephrases them, elaborates upon them, and often places them in the context of the classical theological tradition. -/- I might add that I have been an A.I. skeptic for some time now, concerned over the potential dangers of A.I. in general. But this dialogue, anyway, reveals its potential use as a vehicle for reflection, even profound reflection. -/- . (shrink)

Adaptive preferences give rise to puzzles in ethics, political philosophy, decision theory, and the theory of action. Like our other preferences, adaptive preferences lead us to make choices, take action, and give consent. In 'False Consciousness for Liberals', recently published in The Philosophical Review, David Enoch (2020) proposes a criterion by which to identify when these choices, actions, and acts of consent are less than fully autonomous; that is, when they suffer from what Natalie Stoljar (2014) calls an 'autonomy deficit'. (...) According to Enoch, such actions are not protected in the usual way against interference by others; there is not the same prohibition against trying to prevent someone from acting in a particular way when that action is motivated by such adaptive preferences and is an attempt to satisfy them. In this note, I raise two concerns about Enoch's criterion. (shrink)

When we abandon the neoliberal fiction that one is independent on the grounds that it is a-historic and antisocial, we realize that everyone is dependent and interdependent. In a media-driven society the self-identity of the individual is formed within the framework of the culture-ideology of consumerism from early childhood. As a result, both the environmental and social destruction have intensified. In the global era, or in the era of the global environmental crisis, self-identity as a precondition for environmentally sustainable care (...) of the self should be based on the culture-ideology of human rights and responsibilities, and on conscious self-limitation which realizes that one’s prosperity and security cannot come at the expense of others. Care of the self is about ensuring the habitability of the global environment as the primary interest of each individual. (shrink)

This report from the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage offers advice on how to make progress fairly towards universal health coverage.

Human biological memory systems have adapted to use technological artifacts to overcome some of the limitations of these systems. For example, when performing a difficult calculation, we use pen and paper to create and store external number symbols; when remembering our appointments, we use a calendar; when remembering what to buy, we use a shopping list. This chapter looks at the history of memory artifacts, describing the evolution from cave paintings to virtual reality. It first characterizes memory artifacts, memory systems, (...) and the two main functions such artifacts have, which are to aid individual users in completing memory tasks and as a cultural inheritance channel (section 2). It then outlines some of our first symbolic practices such as making cave paintings and figurines, and then moves on to outline several key developments in external representational systems and the artifacts that support these such as written language, numeral systems and counting devices, diagrams and maps, measuring devices, libraries and archives, photographs, analogue and digital computational artifacts, the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and smartphones (section 3). After that, it makes some brief points about the cumulative nature of the cultural evolution of memory artifacts and speculates about the possible future of memory artifacts, arguing that it is very difficult to look beyond an epistemological horizon of more than five years (section 4). (shrink)

David Hilbert's finitistic standpoint is a conception of elementary number theory designed to answer the intuitionist doubts regarding the security and certainty of mathematics. Hilbert was unfortunately not exact in delineating what that viewpoint was, and Hilbert himself changed his usage of the term through the 1920s and 30s. The purpose of this paper is to outline what the main problems are in understanding Hilbert and Bernays on this issue, based on some publications by them which have so far received (...) little attention, and on a number of philosophical reconstructions of the viewpoint (in particular, by Hand, Kitcher, and Tait). (shrink)

Many consider Nozick’s “utility monster”—a being more efficient than ordinary people at converting resources into wellbeing, with no upper limit—to constitute a damning counterexample to utilitarianism. But our intuitions may be reversed by considering a variation in which the utility monster starts from a baseline status of massive suffering. This suggests a rethinking of the force of the original objection.

The concept of ‘Ethnicity’ still enjoys some currency in the historical and social science literature. However, the cogency of the idea remains disputed. First coming to prominence in the 1980s, the word is often used to depict the character of social relations in the context of conflicts over sovereignty. The case of Northern Ireland presents a paradigmatic example. This article is a rejoinder to Ian McBride’s contention that my scepticism about the notion lacks justification. With reference to disputes over the (...) state, I show in response that ‘ethnicity’ in effect means nationality. I further claim that the nation state is a successor to the dynastic state. In clarifying the meaning of this arrangement, the article brings out how the nation is a juridical rather than empirical category. More specifically, it derives from the notion of corporate personality in law. For this reason, its retrospective integrity is a matter of fabrication, depending on the fiction of ancestral continuity. At the same time, its future-oriented cohesiveness means that it must be invested with a unifying will. I conclude that the legitimacy of a nation state rests on its democratic will, whose coherence is expressed in the action of its government. (shrink)

The primary goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various relations between material artifacts and the embodied mind. A secondary goal of this essay is to identify some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts. First, based on their functional properties, I identify four categories of artifacts co-opted by the embodied mind, namely (1) embodied artifacts, (2) perceptual artifacts, (3) cognitive artifacts, and (4) affective artifacts. These categories can overlap and (...) so some artifacts are members of more than one category. I also identify some of the techniques (or skills) we use when interacting with artifacts. Identifying these categories of artifacts and techniques allows us to map the landscape of relations between embodied minds and the artifactual world. Second, having identified categories of artifacts and techniques, this essay then outlines some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts, focussing on neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and personalisation algorithms nudging their users towards particular epistemic paths of information consumption. (shrink)

Frege famously held that numbers play the role of objects in our language and thought, and that this role is on display when we use sentences like "The number of Jupiter's moons is four". I argue that this role is an example of a general pattern that also encompasses persons, times, locations, reasons, causes, and ways of appearing or acting. These things are 'objects' simply in the sense that they are answers to questions: they are the sort of thing we (...) search for and specify during investigation or inquiry. I support this epistemological conception of objects by studying specificational sentences, a class of sentences which includes Frege's original example. I defend an analysis of such sentences as question-answer pairs, and show how to formally represent this analysis using game-theoretical semantics. (shrink)

Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g. first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criticized for over-intellectualizing consciousness. We show (...) that while higher-order states are cognitively assembled, the requirements are actually considerably less than often presumed. In this sense HOT may be viewed as an intermediate position between GWT and early sensory views. Also, we clarify that most proponents of HOT do not stipulate consciousness as equivalent to metacognition or confidence. Further, compared to other existing theories, HOT can arguably account better for complex everyday experiences, such as of emotions and episodic memories. This makes HOT particularly useful as a framework for conceptualizing pathological mental states. (shrink)

Our values change. What we value, want, desire, prefer, and how much; for nearly everyone, these will be different at different times in their life. These changes can be gradual or abrupt; they can be long-lasting or short-lived; and they can be induced by forces outside yourself or they can come from within or they can have no specific catalyst at all. Such preference change raises a number of questions for our theorising about rational choice, and these have been discussed (...) at length. In §2 and §3, I’ll outline two of these questions along with some of the putative solutions that have been proposed. But preference change also raises questions for our theorising about autonomy, and these have hardly been considered at all. In §4, I’ll outline three problems for personal autonomy; and in §5, I’ll outline one problem for political autonomy. In §6, I conclude. (shrink)

What does it mean to ‘give’ the value of a variable in an algebraic context, and how does giving the value of a variable differ from merely describing it? I argue that to answer this question, we need to examine the role that giving the value of a variable plays in problem-solving practice. I argue that four different features are required for a statement to count as giving the value of a variable in the context of solving an elementary algebra (...) problem: the variable must be in the scope opened by the problem statement; the values given must be in the range of the variable, which is determined by the problem; the statement giving the values must represent a complete solution; and it must be in a canonical form. This account helps us better understand elementary algebra itself, as well as the use of algebraic tools to analyze phenomena in natural language. (shrink)

Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as Hilbert developed systems of logic to formalize mathematics. These systems were meant to serve either as themselves foundational, or at least as formal analogs of mathematical reasoning amenable to mathematical study, e.g., in Hilbert’s consistency program. Similar efforts continue, but have been (...) expanded by the development of sophisticated methods to study the properties of such systems using proof and model theory. In parallel with this evolution of logical formalisms as tools for articulating mathematical theories (broadly speaking), much progress has been made in the quest for a mechanization of logical inference and the investigation of its theoretical limits, culminating recently in the development of new foundational frameworks for mathematics with sophisticated computer-assisted proof systems. In addition, logical formalisms developed by logicians in mathematical and philosophical contexts have proved immensely useful in describing theories and systems of interest to computer scientists, and to some degree, vice versa. Three examples of the influence of logic in computer science are automated reasoning, computer verification, and type systems for programming languages. (shrink)

This paper presents the first bibliometric mapping analysis of the field of computer and information ethics (C&IE). It provides a map of the relations between 400 key terms in the field. This term map can be used to get an overview of concepts and topics in the field and to identify relations between information and communication technology concepts on the one hand and ethical concepts on the other hand. To produce the term map, a data set of over thousand articles (...) published in leading journals and conference proceedings in the C&IE field was constructed. With the help of various computer algorithms, key terms were identified in the titles and abstracts of the articles and co-occurrence frequencies of these key terms were calculated. Based on the co-occurrence frequencies, the term map was constructed. This was done using a computer program called VOSviewer. The term map provides a visual representation of the C&IE field and, more specifically, of the organization of the field around three main concepts, namely privacy, ethics, and the Internet. (shrink)

The main focus of my comments is the role played in Dickie's view by the idea that "the mind has a need to represent things outside itself". But there are also some remarks about her (very interesting) suggestion that descriptive names can sometimes fail to refer to the object that satisfies the associated description.

There are three main moral theories: virtue ethics, the deontological approach and utilitarianism. The concern here is how they interrelate, why they come into focus at different times and places, and how they are configured in their application to a modern democratic society. Person-oriented virtue ethics was the dominant understanding in Ancient Greece but within the Western tradition this was later subordinated to the monotheism of Ancient Judaism as modified by Christianity. Of growing importance by the eighteenth century was rights (...) theory which was often still situated religiously. Kant’s principle of the categorical imperative has been highly influential but was challenged by the emerging nature of industrial and capitalist society. Utilitarianism, within which the moral rightness of activity resides in its tendency to promote happiness or unhappiness, represented the decisive move from the transcendental to the immanent approach. Although all three approaches to moral theory continue to be relevant to identifiable situations and aspects of modern society, there has been a substantial turn towards a heavily modified utilitarianism associated with parliamentary democracy and market economies founded on property ownership. The root cause of this is the ability of utilitarianism, as opposed to the other approaches, to handle considerations of number and probability. The concept of utility is fundamental in economics but the idea has evolved away from its origins to mean “preference”. There is a sense in which the straightforward appeal of basic utilitarianism has been “leased out” in modified form to a set of institutional arrangements. Certain “pressure points” in a modern society are noted which pose particular problems pertinent to moral theory. Bernard Williams argues persuasively for an appropriately modified form of virtue ethics. (shrink)

This is the second part of my theological dialogue with ChatGPT on the meaning of God. We explore the nature of God's agency, will, goodness, the problem of evil and suffering, the meaning of sin, and the meaning and nature of the redemptive act of Christ.

Disagreement is common: even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This volume examines the epistemology of disagreement. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: but this will be the first book focusing on the general epistemic issues arising from informed (...) disagreement. Ten leading philosophers offer specially written essays which together will offer a starting-point for future work on this topic. (shrink)