According to James McCawley (1981) and Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal (1995), the following sentence is three-ways ambiguous: -/- Harry wants to be the mayor of Kenai. -/- According to them also, the three-way ambiguity cannot be accommodated on the Russellian view that definite descriptions are quantified noun phrases. In order to capture the three-way ambiguity of the sentence, these authors propose that definite descriptions must be ambiguous: sometimes they are predicate expressions; sometimes they are Russellian quantified noun (...) phrases. After explaining why the McCawley-Larson-Segal solution contains an obvious flaw, I discuss how an effort to correct the flaw brings to light certain puzzles about the individuation of desires, about quantifying in, and about the disambiguation of desire ascriptions. (shrink)

In the last two decades, Davidson’s event-argument hypothesis has become very popular in natural language semantics. This article questions that event-based analyses actually add something to our understanding of the respective phenomena: I argue that they already find their explanation in independently motivated grammatical assumptions and principles which apply to all kinds of modification. Apart from a short discussion of Davidson’s original arguments in favour of his hypothesis, I address Larson’s event-based account of the distinctions between stage-level vs. individual-level (...) modification and adverbial vs. adjectival modification in the nominal domain. I argue that his analysis of the former reduces straightforwardly to the grammatical structure of the nominal phase. As for the latter, I provide reasons which motivate a re-description of the phenomenon in terms of sensitivity to descriptive content rather than events. I argue that, so described, the phenomenon can be explained in terms of interface conditions, given a phasal architecture of grammar. (shrink)

This essay offers a philosophical analysis of the increased rates of hesitancy among Black Americans regarding treatment for Covid-19. I argue that public health researchers have identified epistemic norms pertaining to the credibility and trustworthiness of public health institutions in Black communities. In other words, norms of credibility have developed in Black communities as a result of the mistreatment of Black Americans by public health institutions and organizations. To make this argument, Section 2 argues that the “origin” or historical circumstances (...) regarding the emergence of an institution are salient to the formation of institutional trust. Section 3 develops an account of epistemic normativity as derived from the work of Antti Kauppinen, Miranda Fricker, and Catherine Elgin. Section 4 applies the arguments from the previous sections to show that absent a “clean origin,” norms of credibility regarding institutional functionality have formed in Black communities that have prevented medical treatment for Covid-19. (shrink)

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis (...) they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

According to proponents of the extended mind, bio-external resources, such as a notebook or a smartphone, are candidate parts of the cognitive and mental machinery that realises cognitive states and processes. The present chapter discusses three areas of ethical concern associated with the extended mind, namely mental privacy, mental manipulation, and agency. We also examine the ethics of the extended mind from the standpoint of three general normative frameworks, namely, consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

In this paper, I argue that responsible knowers are responsive to critical feedback that their reasons for believing in a given proposition or using certain principles of reasoning are inadequate. The project of democracy expects that agents can provide reasons for their beliefs during testimonial exchange. Voters provide reasons to representatives. Representatives provide reasons to voters. Voters provide reasons to each other. And representatives provide reasons to each other. This means that when voters or representatives cannot provide reasons, democratic mechanisms (...) are obstructed. But not all beliefs are adopted autonomously through reflection, but rather by social-institutional context. I argue, then, that responsible agents reflect on the reasons for their belief when their reasons are inadequate. They are attuned to the nature of expertise and evaluate expert testimony with this in mind. In full, democracy requires that agents hold beliefs autonomously and be cognizant of the nature of expertise. (shrink)

This paper will explore the notion that religiously justified acts have often been the source of great harm. From the continued persecution of the LGBTQ community to acts like the Waco incident and in extreme cases, even genocide can often stem from religious belief. There does exist, however, a more generalized, noncentralized belief system (which I call “spirituality”) which seeks similar motives as most organized religions, but rarely—if ever— leads towards such terrifying and monstrous acts. In this paper, I pose (...) that modern organized religion can learn from the individualized focus of spiritualities to create a more open practice which would allow for more personal reflection before engagement in the congregation and, I pose, would lead to less horrendous acts of physical and cultural violence. Neither religion, nor spirituality is wavering in the modern world, so why not learn to use them to benefit the greater society, rather than using them as reasons to harm others? This should be a larger focus of religious congregations—the manner in which they interact with others about their beliefs. (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)

A uniform construction for sequent calculi for finite-valued first-order logics with distribution quantifiers is exhibited. Completeness, cut-elimination and midsequent theorems are established. As an application, an analog of Herbrand’s theorem for the four-valued knowledge-representation logic of Belnap and Ginsberg is presented. It is indicated how this theorem can be used for reasoning about knowledge bases with incomplete and inconsistent information.

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)

All disciplines must define their basic units and core processes. In evolutionary biology, the core process is natural selection and the basic unit of selection and adaptation is the individual. To operationalize the theory of natural selection we must count individuals, as they are the bearers of fitness. While canonical individuals have often been taken to be multicellular organisms, the hierarchy of life shows that new kinds of individuals have evolved. A variety of criteria have been used to define biological (...) individuality. Some criteria rely on the presence/absence of a particular property while others advocate an approach that reflects the process of natural selection. The plethora of approaches to classifying individuality has resulted in confusion regarding how to study individuality in a given taxon. (shrink)

The Black Panther Party is now commonly associated with violence; however, this was far from what they aimed to represent. The Party was aimed at total social and political reconstruction and, their larger point, creating an equitable society in which Black Americans could thrive. The criticism which the Party faced (and still faces) was through their use of “armed self-defense” and methods of political violence. From a philosophical perspective, many interesting questions can be considered when evaluating the morality of the (...) utilization of armed self-defense. In this paper, I will use Just War Theory to answer the question: can non-state actors be justified in their usage of violence against states? Specifically, I will claim that the Black Panther Party’s use of armed self-defense and political, physical violence was morally justified under an expanded just war theoretic. To do this, I will first analyze political violence and resistance to clarify how my account will understand the two and their potential overlap. Next, I will clarify Just War Theory and provide thorough discussion of the “competent authority” criterion and argue that select non-state actors can be competent authorities. Finally, I will apply my expanded just war theoretic to the case of the Black Panther Party and their use of armed self-defense. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the fact that for all finitely-many-valued logics there is a completely systematic relation between sequent calculi and tableau systems. More importantly, we show that for both of these systems there are al- ways two dual proof sytems (not just only two ways to interpret the calculi). This phenomenon may easily escape one’s attention since in the classical (two-valued) case the two systems coincide. (In two-valued logic the assignment of a truth value and (...) the exclusion of the opposite truth value describe the same situation.). (shrink)

This memorandum, originally written in 1961 and published in an obscure journal in 1986, emphasizes the degree to which general acceptance has been substituted for proof in current scientific practice. Its main objective is to reveal which generally accepted ideas have no sound factual basis and therefore _could_ be erroneous. The new and improved basic theory that is fervently desired must conflict with some items of this kind, and probably with many of them. Such conflicts, if confined to the categories (...) herein enumerated, do not constitute valid arguments against any new theory that may be proposed, and should not be allowed to block consideration of new theories. (shrink)

This dissertation describes and assesses post-1961 Soviet discussions of the nature of the person. It focuses on post-1961 literature because the volume of Soviet material on the nature of the person increases dramatically following the 22d Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . At that congress the CPSU declared that the USSR had become a socialist nation and that the country would now build a communist society. According to the CPSU, building communism required educating persons capable of (...) living in communist society. ;Unlike many Western theories on the nature of the person, Soviet theories do not proceed from the proposition that a person's consciousness or self-consciousness differentiates him from all other kinds of entity. They proceed rather from the proposition that a person is different from all other kinds of entity because he is social. Soviets attempt to describe what makes persons social. ;Soviets have argued among themselves concerning a number of issues regarding the nature of persons. During the early 1960s some argued that no general theory of the person was possible and that theories must center on persons of particular classes and historical eras. In the late 1960s Soviets came to believe that a general theory of the person is possible. ;General theories of the person presented by Soviets sometimes distinguish between persons, humans and individuals. This distinction is most clear when these are conceived as properly social, bio-social, and properly biological entities, respectively. There is no general agreement concerning this distinction, however, and this lack of agreement has carried over into discussions of the essence of Man. This essence is said to consist in social relations. ;Soviets have attempted to account for a person's social nature by concentrating on his ethical behavior, his social roles and his activity. None of these accounts succeeds in describing what makes persons social. ;Since social relations are considered the essence of Man, Soviets attempt to characterize them. The best attempt to do this describes social relations as relations between conscious entities. This attempt fails because it is inconsistent with Marxist dogma that consciousness is a consequence--not a cause--of Man's social nature. It also fails because it does not exclude some apparently non-social relations. ;Research for this dissertation was conducted at the libraries of Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Moscow State University and Leningrad State University, and at the Library of Congress and the Lenin Library. (shrink)

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

Vaccine research, as well as the development, testing, clinical trials, and commercial uses of vaccines involve complex processes with various biological data that include gene and protein expression, analysis of molecular and cellular interactions, study of tissue and whole body responses, and extensive epidemiological modeling. Although many data resources are available to meet different aspects of vaccine needs, it remains a challenge how we are to standardize vaccine annotation, integrate data about varied vaccine types and resources, and support advanced vaccine (...) data analysis and inference. To address these problems, the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) has been developed through collaboration with vaccine researchers and many national and international centers and programs, including the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Initiative, and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). VO utilizes the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top ontology and the Relation Ontology (RO) for definition of term relationships. VO is represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and edited using the Protégé-OWL. Currently VO contains more than 2000 terms and relationships. VO emphasizes on classification of vaccines and vaccine components, vaccine quality and phenotypes, and host immune response to vaccines. These reflect different aspects of vaccine composition and biology and can thus be used to model individual vaccines. More than 200 licensed vaccines and many vaccine candidates in research or clinical trials have been modeled in VO. VO is being used for vaccine literature mining through collaboration with the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI). Multiple VO applications will be presented. (shrink)

It is shown that Gqp↑, the quantified propositional Gödel logic based on the truth-value set V↑ = {1 - 1/n : n≥1}∪{1}, is decidable. This result is obtained by reduction to Büchi's theory S1S. An alternative proof based on elimination of quantifiers is also given, which yields both an axiomatization and a characterization of Gqp↑ as the intersection of all finite-valued quantified propositional Gödel logics.

This essay considers the role of the soul in Plato’s political philosophy. Contra Gerasimos Santas, I offer a reading of Republic 8 which takes Plato’s criticism of the democratic soul as his criticism of the psychological pressures innate in the democratic constitution. On this account, democracy fails because it encourages unnecessary appetites. These appetites breed anarchy and ignorance under the guise of freedom. Section two reviews Santas reading of the Republic and his interpretation of Plato’s treatment of democratic principles: private (...) property, knowledge, and freedom. Section three provides a reading which takes the soul into consideration. Reading the descent to democracy and the birth of the democratic man as indicative of the pressures of the democratic system, we gain insights into the psychology of democracy. (shrink)

Whilst media and political rhetoric in Britain is sceptical and often outright damning of the (presumed) morals and behaviours of the White marginalized poor, our aim is to explore the conditions under which successful communities are nevertheless built. Specifically, we examine the features of community and stress its importance both for belonging and bonding around shared norms and practices and for fostering the necessary bridging essential for interacting and cooperating with others. In considering what it means to foster a community (...) that acts as a breakwater against the tides of stigma or disadvantage, we pay special attention to what we will call enabling conditions – essential features that communities either can or should be able to provide or that exist independent of communities and are indispensable for accessing opportunities in the wider society. We detail the dynamics of White poverty and exclusion before turning our attention to possible responses to these challenges. In searching for viable responses to stigma and disadvantage, we compare some different typologies of community presently available to the White poor in Britain and examine whether these are sufficient to satisfy the enabling conditions associated with more robust forms of group membership. (shrink)

Frege says, at the end of a discussion of formalism in the Foundations of Arithmetic, that his own foundational program “could be called formal” but is “completely different” from the view he has just criticized. This essay examines Frege’s relationship to Hermann Hankel, his main formalist interlocutor in the Foundations, in order to make sense of these claims. The investigation reveals a surprising result: Frege’s foundational program actually has quite a lot in common with Hankel’s. This undercuts Frege’s claim that (...) his own view is completely different from Hankel’s formalism, and motivates a closer examination of where the differences lie. On the interpretation offered here, Frege shares important parts of the formalist perspective, but differs in recognizing a kind of content for arithmetical terms which can only be made available via proof from prior postulates. (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.

The problem of closure for the traditional unstructured possible worlds model of attitudinal content is that it treats belief and other cognitive states as closed under entailment, despite apparent counterexamples showing that this is not a necessary property of such states. One solution to this problem, which has been proposed recently by several authors (Schaffer 2005; Yalcin 2018; Hoek forthcoming), is to restrict closure in an unstructured setting by treating propositional attitudes as question-sensitive. Here I argue that this line of (...) response is unsatisfying as it stands because the problem of closure is more general than is typically discussed. A version of the problem recurs for attitudes like wondering, entertaining, considering, and so on, which are directed at questions rather than propositions. For such questioning attitudes, the appeal to question-sensitivity is much less convincing as a solution to the problem of closure. (shrink)

All first-order Gödel logics G_V with globalization operator based on truth value sets V C [0,1] where 0 and 1 lie in the perfect kernel of V are axiomatized by Ciabattoni’s hypersequent calculus HGIF.

It is shown that the infinite-valued first-order Gödel logic G° based on the set of truth values {1/k: k ε w {0}} U {0} is not r.e. The logic G° is the same as that obtained from the Kripke semantics for first-order intuitionistic logic with constant domains and where the order structure of the model is linear. From this, the unaxiomatizability of Kröger's temporal logic of programs (even of the fragment without the nexttime operator O) and of the authors' temporal (...) logic of linear discrete time with gaps follows. (shrink)

We provide a philosophical reconstruction and analysis of the debate on the scientific status of cosmic inflation that has played out in recent years. In a series of critical papers, Ijjas et al. have questioned the scientificality of the current views on cosmic inflation. Proponents of cosmic inflation have in turn defended the scientific credentials of their approach. We argue that, while this defense, narrowly construed, is successful against Ijjas et al., the latter's reasoning does point to a significant epistemic (...) issue that arises with respect to inflation. A broadening of the concept of theory assessment is needed to address that issue in an adequate way. (shrink)

In a series of papers over the past twenty years, and in a new book, Igor Douven has argued that Bayesians are too quick to reject versions of inference to the best explanation that cannot be accommodated within their framework. In this paper, I survey their worries and attempt to answer them using a series of pragmatic and purely epistemic arguments that I take to show that Bayes’ Rule really is the only rational way to respond to your evidence.

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)

This article provides an overview and analysis of recent work on the extended self, demonstrating that the boundaries of selves are fluid, shifting across biological, artifactual, and sociocultural structures. First, it distinguishes the notions of minimal self, person, and narrative self. Second, it surveys how philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists argue that embodiment, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and moral character traits can be extended and what that implies for the boundaries of selves. It also reviews and responds to various criticisms and (...) counterarguments against the extended self. The main focus is on the link between the extended mind and extended self, which has received the most attention in recent literature. But accounts of the extended self developed independently of the extended mind are also briefly discussed. This article ends by drawing out some of the conceptual, methodological, and normative implications of the extended self and suggesting some directions for future research. (shrink)

One goal of this paper is to argue that autobiographical memories are extended and distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources. This is important because such distributed memories play a constitutive role in our narrative identity. So, some of the building blocks of our narrative identity are not brain-bound but extended and distributed. Recognising the distributed nature of memory and narrative identity, invites us to find treatments and strategies focusing on the environment in which dementia patients are situated. A second (...) goal of this paper is to suggest various of such strategies, including lifelogging technologies such as SenseCams, life story books, multimedia biographies, memory boxes, ambient intelligence systems, and virtual reality applications. Such technologies allow dementia patients to remember their personal past in a way that wouldn’t be possible by merely relying on their biological memory, in that way aiding in preserving their narrative identity and positively contributing to their sense of well-being. (shrink)

Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our resources, are those that focus on (i) ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and (ii) improving the quality of the lives that inhabit that long future. While it is by no means the only one, the argument most commonly given for this conclusion is that these interventions have greater expected goodness (...) per unit of resource devoted to them than each of the other available interventions, including those that focus on the health and well-being of the current population. In this paper, I argue that, even if we grant the consequentialist ethics upon which this argument depends, and even if we grant one of the axiologies that are typically paired with that ethics to give the argument, we are not morally required to choose an option that maximises expected utility; indeed, we might not even be permitted to do so. Instead, I will argue, if the argument's consequentialism is correct, we should choose using a decision theory that is sensitive to risk, and allows us to give greater weight to worse-case outcomes than expected utility theory does. And, I will show, such decision theories do not always recommend longtermist interventions. Indeed, sometimes, they recommend exactly the opposite: sometimes, they recommend hastening human extinction. Many, though not all, will take this as a reductio of the consequentialism or the axiology of the argument. I remain agnostic on the conclusion we should draw. (shrink)

Epistemologists who study credences have a well-developed account of how you should change them when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they boast a diverse range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of possibilities and propositions you have not entertained before; that is, when your awareness grows. In this (...) paper, I consider the arguments for the credal epistemologist's account of how to respond to evidence, and I ask whether they can help us generate an account of how to respond to awareness growth. The results are surprising: the arguments that all support the same norms for responding to evidence growth support a number of different norms when they are applied to awareness growth. Some of these norms seem too weak, others too strong. I ask what we should conclude from this, and argue that our credal response to awareness growth is considerably less rigorously constrained than our credal response to new evidence. (shrink)

The question of church-state separation has haunted America since her founding. James Madison and select founding fathers suggest that religions and states are better off when they minimize (or altogether eliminate) their interactions. Many Muslims in Iran, for instance, believe the opposite – aligning state functions with religious motives results in the most effective state. In this paper, I propose a model of thinking about church-state separation in which states and religions must maintain epistemic vulnerability to allow legal, political, and (...) socio-religious change. Simply put, epistemic vulnerability is an attitude of susceptibility to new sources and instances of knowledge. I present institutions as sets of constraints which interact with shared mental models. In this way, I explain how cultural institutions limit and shape individuals’ susceptibility to new knowledge. The more accommodating a religion is to self-assessment when confronted with new knowledge aids in forming institutions that are reliable, efficient, and robust for groups to grow and adopt new ideas. This results in a model of state-religion that highlights the impact on epistemic vulnerability when either religious organizations or state governance expand their responsibilities outside of their proper functions. (shrink)

Conservative assumptions in medical ethics risk immense harms during a pandemic. Public health institutions and public discourse alike have repeatedly privileged inaction over aggressive medical interventions to address the pandemic, perversely increasing population-wide risks while claiming to be guided by ‘caution’. This puzzling disconnect between rhetoric and reality is suggestive of an underlying philosophical confusion. In this paper, I argue that we have been misled by status quo bias—exaggerating the moral significance of the risks inherent in medical interventions, while systematically (...) neglecting the risks inherent in the status quo prospect of an out-of-control pandemic. By coming to appreciate the possibility and significance of status quo risk, we will be better prepared to respond appropriately when the next pandemic strikes. (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) has commonly been seen as Europe’s leading philosopher since Kant. His influence extended across the globe down to the Second World War – not least through his dissident disciple, Karl Marx. Since then, despite intermittent revivals, his importance has tended to be eclipsed by a rising tide of anti-modernist polemic, extending from Heidegger to postmodernism. Central to Hegel’s political thought was his view of the French Revolution. But notwithstanding its pivotal role in the development of (...) his ideas, his reaction to that event has been systematically misconstrued. In presenting a more faithful account of Hegel’s interpretation of his own era, the argument presented here places his response to contemporary developments in the context of a series of World Revolutions which framed the meaning of his age. This approach serves to illustrate the unique combination of historical and philosophical reasoning on which Hegel’s thought depended. In the process, reconstructing his arguments raises challenging questions about the applicability of bygone political ideas to later historical periods. (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.

There are many reasons we might want to take the opinions of various individuals and pool them to give the opinions of the group they constitute. If all the individuals in the group have probabilistic opinions about the same propositions, there is a host of pooling functions we might deploy, such as linear or geometric pooling. However, there are also cases where different members of the group assign probabilities to different sets of propositions, which might overlap a lot, a little, (...) or not at all. There are far fewer proposals for how to proceed in these cases, and those there are have undesirable features. I begin by considering four proposals and arguing that they don't work. Then I'll describe my own proposal, which is intended to cover the situation in which we want to pool the individual opinions in order to ascribe an opinion to the group considered as an agent in its own right. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an object (...) to reconstruct an autobiographical memory. In such cases, autobiographical memory is extended or distributed. (shrink)

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we (...) interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across different generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. Thus, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology distributes our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction. (shrink)

In the first half of this paper, I argue that group belief ascriptions are highly ambiguous. What's more, in many cases, neither the available contextual factors nor known pragmatic considerations are sufficient to allow the audience to identify which of the many possible meanings is intended. In the second half, I argue that this ambiguity often has bad consequences when a group belief ascription is heard and taken as testimony. And indeed it has these consequences even when the ascription is (...) true on the speaker's intended interpretation, when the speaker does not intend to mislead and indeed intends to cooperatively inform, and when the audience incorporates the evidence from the testimony as they should. I conclude by arguing that these consequences should lead us to stop using such ascriptions. (shrink)

This essay outlines one way to conceptualise the relation between cultural identity, collective memory, and artifacts. It starts by characterising the notion of cultural identity as our membership to cultural groups and briefly explores the relation between cultural and narrative identity (section 2). Next, it presents how human memory is conceptualised on an individual and collective level (section 3) and then distinguishes between small-scale and large-scale collective memory (section 4). Having described cultural identity and collective memory, it argues that cultural (...) identity is materialised in the environment when we retrieve and construct collective memories by integrating information from our biological memory with information in artifacts or in other people’s embodied brains (section 5). This essay ends with analysing how materialised cultural identities are constructed by using a niche construction approach from evolutionary biology (section 6). (shrink)

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.

Accuracy arguments for the core tenets of Bayesian epistemology differ mainly in the conditions they place on the legitimate ways of measuring the inaccuracy of our credences. The best existing arguments rely on three conditions: Continuity, Additivity, and Strict Propriety. In this paper, I show how to strengthen the arguments based on these conditions by showing that the central mathematical theorem on which each depends goes through without assuming Additivity.

There are various philosophical approaches and theories describing the intimate relation people have to artifacts. In this paper, I explore the relation between two such theories, namely distributed cognition and distributed morality theory. I point out a number of similarities and differences in these views regarding the ontological status they attribute to artifacts and the larger systems they are part of. Having evaluated and compared these views, I continue by focussing on the way cognitive artifacts are used in moral practice. (...) I specifically conceptualise how such artifacts (a) scaffold and extend moral reasoning and decision-making processes, (b) have a certain moral status which is contingent on their cognitive status, and (c) whether responsibility can be attributed to distributed systems. This paper is primarily written for those interested in the intersection of cognitive and moral theory as it relates to artifacts, but also for those independently interested in philosophical debates in extended and distributed cognition and ethics of (cognitive) technology. (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)

Orthodox semantics for natural language modals give rise to two puzzles for their interactions with disjunction: Ross’s puzzle and the puzzle of free choice permission. It is widely assumed that each puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from the truth of a possibility or necessity modal with an embedded disjunction, hearers infer that each disjunct is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I argue that Diversity inferences are too weak to explain the full (...) range of data. Instead, I argue, modals with embedded disjunctions license ‘Independence’ inferences: from the truth of a modal with an embedded disjunction, hearers infer that each disjunct is an independent alternative among the relevant set of worlds. I then develop a bilateral inquisitive semantics for modals that predicts the validity of these Independence inferences. My account vindicates common intuitions about both Ross’s puzzle and the puzzle of free choice permission, and explains the full range of data. (shrink)

I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of (...) ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic self. To develop this claim, (...) I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves. (shrink)