If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

Inflicting harm is generally preferable to inflicting death. If you must choose between the two, you should generally choose to harm. But prenatal harm seems different. If a mother must choose between harming her fetus or aborting it, she may choose either, at least in many cases. So it seems that prenatal harm is particularly objectionable, sometimes on a par with death. This paper offers an explanation of why prenatal harm seems particularly objectionable by drawing an analogy to the all-or-nothing (...) problem. It then argues that this analogy offers independent support for the ‘voluntarist’ view that at least some parental role obligations are grounded in the choice to be a parent. (shrink)

Decisions are made under uncertainty when there are distinct outcomes of a given action, and one is uncertain to which the act will lead. Decisions are made under indeterminacy when there are distinct outcomes of a given action, and it is indeterminate to which the act will lead. This paper develops a theory of (synchronic and diachronic) decision-making under indeterminacy that portrays the rational response to such situations as inconstant. Rational agents have to capriciously and randomly choose how to resolve (...) the indeterminacy relevant to a given choice-situation, but such capricious choices once made constrain how they will choose in the future. The account is illustrated by the case of self-interested action in situations where it is indeterminate whether you yourself will survive to benefit or suffer the consequences. The conclusion emphasizes some distinctive anti-hedging predictions of the account. (shrink)

Might it be that world itself, independently of what we know about it or how we represent it, is metaphysically indeterminate? This article tackles in turn a series of questions: In what sorts of cases might we posit metaphysical indeterminacy? What is it for a given case of indefiniteness to be 'metaphysical'? How does the phenomenon relate to 'ontic vagueness', the existence of 'vague objects', 'de re indeterminacy' and the like? How might the logic work? Are there reasons for postulating (...) this distinctive sort of indefiniteness? Conversely, are there reasons for denying that there is indefiniteness of this sort? (shrink)

I defend the widely-held view that morally worthy action need not be motivated by a desire to promote rightness as such. Some have recently come to reject this view, arguing that desires for rightness as such are necessary for avoiding a certain kind of luck thought incompatible with morally worthy action. I show that those who defend desires for rightness as such on the basis of this argument misunderstand the relationship between moral worth and the kind of luck that their (...) argument employs. Consequently, the argument provides no reason to doubt the popular view that a desire for rightness as such is no part of virtue. I conclude by suggesting that a family of worries about merely accidentally right action presuppose one side of the recent debate about objectivism and perspectivism about moral rightness. (shrink)

Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘ eligibility ’ response: some theories are better than others, not because they fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but (...) instead flows naturally from three independently motivated elements; and to show that severe limitations afflict the proposal. In conclusion, I pick out the element of the eligibility response that is responsible for the limitations: future work in this area should therefore concentrate on amending this aspect of the overall theory. (shrink)

The concept of moral wrongness, many think, has a distinctive kind of referential stability, brought out by moral twin earth cases. This article offers a new account of the source of this stability, deriving it from a metaphysics of content: “substantive” radical interpretation, and first-order normative assumptions. This story is distinguished from extant “reference magnetic” explanations of the phenomenon, and objections and replies are considered.

While it is tempting to suppose that an act has moral worth just when and because it is motivated by sufficient moral reasons, philosophers have, largely, come to doubt this analysis. Doubt is rooted in two claims. The first is that some facts can motivate a given act in multiple ways, not all of which are consistent with moral worth. The second is the orthodox view that normative reasons are facts. I defend the tempting analysis by proposing and defending a (...) heterodox account of both normative and motivating reasons that is inspired by Donald Davidson’s primary reasons. We should adopt the heterodox view, I argue, because it addresses an overlooked but fatal defect in the orthodox conception of reasons, of which challenges to the tempting analysis are a special case. (shrink)

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

Revisionary theories of logic or truth require revisionary theories of mind. This essay outlines nonclassically based theories of rational belief, desire, and decision making, singling out the supervaluational family for special attention. To see these nonclassical theories of mind in action, this essay examines a debate between David Lewis and Derek Parfit over what matters in survival. Lewis argued that indeterminacy in personal identity allows caring about psychological connectedness and caring about personal identity to amount to the same thing. The (...) essay argues that Lewis's treatment of two of Parfit's puzzle cases—degreed survival and fission—presuppose different nonclassical treatments of belief and desire. (shrink)

Lewis (1973) gave a short argument against conditional excluded middle, based on his treatment of ‘might’ counterfactuals. Bennett (2003), with much of the recent literature, gives an alternative take on ‘might’ counterfactuals. But Bennett claims the might-argument against CEM still goes through. This turns on a specific claim I call Bennett’s Hypothesis. I argue that independently of issues to do with the proper analysis of might-counterfactuals, Bennett’s Hypothesis is inconsistent with CEM. But Bennett’s Hypothesis is independently objectionable, so we should (...) resolve this tension by dropping the Hypothesis, not by dropping CEM. (shrink)

Louis Pojman and Robert Westmoreland have compiled the best material on the subject of equality, ranging from classical works by Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau to contemporary works by John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Michael Walzer, Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams and Robert Nozick; and including such topics as: the concept of equality; equal opportunity; Welfare egalitarianism; resources; equal human rights and complex equality.

Worlds where things divide forever ("gunk" worlds) are apparently conceivable. The conceivability of such scenarios has been used as an argument against "nihilist" or "near-nihilist" answers to the special composition question. I argue that the mereological nihilist has the resources to explain away the illusion that gunk is possible.

Joyce (1998) gives an argument for probabilism: the doctrine that rational credences should conform to the axioms of probability. In doing so, he provides a distinctive take on how the normative force of probabilism relates to the injunction to believe what is true. But Joyce presupposes that the truth values of the propositions over which credences are defined are classical. I generalize the core of Joyce’s argument to remove this presupposition. On the same assumptions as Joyce uses, the credences of (...) a rational agent should always be weighted averages of truth value assignments. In the special case where the truth values are classical, the weighted averages of truth value assignments are exactly the probability functions. But in the more general case, probabilistic axioms formulated in terms of classical logic are violated—but we will show that generalized versions of the axioms formulated in terms of non-classical logics are satisfied. (shrink)

Jeff Paris proves a generalized Dutch Book theorem. If a belief state is not a generalized probability then one faces ‘sure loss’ books of bets. In Williams I showed that Joyce’s accuracy-domination theorem applies to the same set of generalized probabilities. What is the relationship between these two results? This note shows that both results are easy corollaries of the core result that Paris appeals to in proving his dutch book theorem. We see that every point of accuracy-domination defines a (...) dutch book, but we only have a partial converse. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Derek Parfit made the bold suggestion, at various times under the heading of the "Normativity Objection," that anyone in possession of normative concepts is in a position to know, on the basis of their competence with such concepts alone, that reductive realism in ethics is not even possible. Despite the prominent role that the Normativity Objection plays in Parfit's non-reductive account of the nature of normativity, when the objection hasn't been ignored, it's been criticized and even derided. (...) We argue that the exclusively negative attention that the objection has received has been a mistake. On our reading, Parfit's Normativity Objection poses a serious threat to reductivism, as it exposes the uneasy relationship between our a priori knowledge of a range of distinctly normative truths and the typical package of semantic commitments that reductivists have embraced since the Kripkean revolution. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are 'black boxes'. The initial response in the literature was a demand for 'explainable AI'. However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or 'interpretable' is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritising interpretability in medical AI may constitute a 'lethal prejudice'. In this paper, we defend the value of interpretability (...) in the context of the use of AI in medicine. Clinicians may prefer interpretable systems over more accurate black boxes, which in turn is sufficient to give designers of AI reason to prefer more interpretable systems in order to ensure that AI is adopted and its benefits realised. Moreover, clinicians may be justified in this preference. Achieving the downstream benefits from AI is critically dependent on how the outputs of these systems are interpreted by physicians and patients. A preference for the use of highly accurate black box AI systems, over less accurate but more interpretable systems , may itself constitute a form of lethal prejudice that may diminish the benefits of AI to - and perhaps even harm - patients. (shrink)

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

I propose and defend a novel view called “de se consequentialism,” which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates—contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others—that agent-neutral consequentialism is consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, it clarifies the nature of agent-centered constraints, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated nonconsequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, de se consequentialism enacts constraints through the (...) very same feature that nonconsequentialist theories do. (shrink)

While intimately familiar, gender eludes theorizing. We argue that well-known challenges to gender’s analysis originate in a subtle ambiguity: questions about gender sometimes express questions about gender categories themselves (e.g., womanhood, manhood, and so on), while at other times expressing questions about what makes someone a member of these categories. Distinguishing these questions accentuates gender’s connections to morality, making a novel “antirealist” view of gender, or as we call it, “unrealist” view, especially natural. Gender’s relations to identity, sex, and social (...) position are illuminated along the way. Taking cues from both historical and contemporary debates in metaethics about the roles that attitudes can play in metaphysical and semantic analysis, we introduce and begin developing a comprehensive non-ameliorative framework for explicating gender’s nature and our thought and talk about it. In a slogan, on the view we defend, you belong to the gender category to which you intrinsically desire to belong. (shrink)

A general survey of Frege's views on truth, the paper explores the problems in response to which Frege's distinctive view that sentences refer to truth-values develops. It also discusses his view that truth-values are objects and the so-called regress argument for the indefinability of truth. Finally, we consider, very briefly, the question whether Frege was a deflationist.

The question of the cognitive role of fictionality is this: what is the correct cognitive attitude to take to p, when it is fictional that p? We began by considering one answer to this question, implicit in the work of Kendall Walton, that the correct response to a fictional proposition is to imagine that proposition. However, this approach is silent in cases of fictional incompleteness, where neither p nor its negation are fictional. We argue that that Waltonians should embrace a (...) pluralistic account of the cognitive role of fictional incompleteness: in some cases of fictional incompleteness, we are permitted to resolve the incompleteness during our engagement with the target fiction, and in other cases, we are obliged not to resolve the incompleteness. But though pluralism is accommodated by Walton’s wider account of fictionality, it puts tension on his motivating idea that fictionality stands to the imagination as truth stands to belief. And so we develop a rival conception of the cognitive role of fictionality that is built around a different analogy: on this evidentialist approach, (known) fictionality stands to the imagination as evidence stands to credence. (shrink)

I outline and motivate a way of implementing a closest world theory of indicatives, appealing to Stalnaker's framework of open conversational possibilities. Stalnakerian conversational dynamics helps us resolve two outstanding puzzles for a such a theory of indicative conditionals. The first puzzle -- concerning so-called 'reverse Sobel sequences' -- can be resolved by conversation dynamics in a theoryneutral way: the explanation works as much for Lewisian counterfactuals as for the account of indicatives developed here. Resolving the second puzzle, by contrast, (...) relies on the interplay between the particular theory of indicative conditionals developed here and Stalnakerian dynamics. The upshot is an attractive resolution of the so-called "Gibbard phenomenon" for indicative conditionals. (shrink)

Are Fregean thoughts compositionally complex and composed of senses? We argue that, in Begriffsschrift, Frege took 'conceptual contents' to be unstructured, but that he quickly moved away from this position, holding just two years later that conceptual contents divide of themselves into 'function' and 'argument'. This second position is shown to be unstable, however, by Frege's famous substitution puzzle. For Frege, the crucial question the puzzle raises is why "The Morning Star is a planet" and "The Evening Star is a (...) planet" have different contents, but his second position predicts that they should have the same content. Frege's response to this antinomy is of course to distinguish sense from reference, but what has not previously been noticed is that this response also requires thoughts to be compositionally complex, composed of senses. That, however, raises the question just how thoughts are composed from senses. We reconstruct a Fregean answer, one that turns on an insistence that this question must be understood as semantic rather than metaphysical. It is not a question about the intrinsic nature of residents of the third realm but a question about how thoughts are expressed by sentences. (shrink)

The idea behind this special theme journal issue was to continue the work we have started with the INBIOSA initiative (www.inbiosa.eu) and our small inter-disciplinary scientific community. The result of this EU funded project was a white paper (Simeonov et al., 2012a) defining a new direction for future research in theoretical biology we called Integral Biomathics and a volume (Simeonov et al., 2012b) with contributions from two workshops and our first international conference in this field in 2011. The initial impulse (...) for this effort was given a year earlier by a publication of one of the guest editors of this issue (Simeonov, 2010) in this journal. This time we wish to provide a broader forum and more space to elaborate in detail some of the most interesting concepts we have encountered in our discussions, as well as to invite some new contributions of particular interest in the field. Another goal we had in mind was to collect and review as many provocative perspectives as possible on the same key topic we are interested before making a decision to follow a more focused notion that would lead to a funded research program. Therefore we welcomed the generous suggestion of Professor Denis Noble, FRS, who is also editor of this journal to prepare a special theme issue entitled: “Can biology create a profoundly new mathematics and computation?” It has taken a while to invite and collect the contributions. Most of them had a couple of revision cycles and adjustments after having been thoroughly discussed with colleagues, incl. the editors of this issue. We think that the result we have obtained at the end is a satisfactory one, since we succeeded to integrate a diversity of original, but sometimes controversial and mutually excluding concepts organized within chapters of a self-contained volume. The task of compiling all this was not easy at all. Despite our efforts to position the articles of different authors and themes in a way allowing their easy comprehension and relation to each other within the individual chapters, some of them still require a sort of introduction to dissolve possible ambiguities. This is what we are going to do in the following few paragraphs with the hope that the reader (and some of the authors) would excuse our failures. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of ​bad beliefs,​ beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called ​moral encroachment​, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad (...) beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s ​Groundwork​, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness. (shrink)

There are advantages to thrift over honest toil. If we can make do without numbers we avoid challenging questions over the metaphysics and epistemology of such entities; and we have a good idea, I think, of what a nominalistic metaphysics should look like. But minimizing ontology brings its own problems; for it seems to lead to error theory— saying that large swathes of common-sense and best science are false. Should recherche philosophical arguments really convince us to give all this up? (...) Such Moorean considerations are explicitly part of the motivation for the recent resurgence of structured metaphysics, which allow a minimal (perhaps nominalistic) fundamental ontology, while avoiding error-theory by adopting a permissive stance towards ontology that can be argued to be grounded in the fundamental. This paper evaluates the Moorean arguments, identifying key epistemological assumptions. On the assumption that Moorean arguments can be used to rule out error-theory, I examine deflationary ‘representationalist’ rivals to the structured metaphysics reaction. Quinean paraphrase, fictionalist claims about syntax and semantics are considered and criticized. In the final section, a ‘direct’ deflationary strategy is outlined and the theoretical obligations that it faces are articulated. The position advocated may have us talking a lot like a friend of structured metaphysics—but with a very different conception of what we’re up to. (shrink)

Objectives: Machine learning (ML) has the potential to facilitate “continual learning” in medicine, in which an ML system continues to evolve in response to exposure to new data over time, even after being deployed in a clinical setting. In this article, we provide a tutorial on the range of ethical issues raised by the use of such “adaptive” ML systems in medicine that have, thus far, been neglected in the literature. -/- Target audience: The target audiences for this tutorial are (...) the developers of ML AI systems, healthcare regulators, the broader medical informatics community, and practicing clinicians. -/- Scope: Discussions of adaptive ML systems to date have overlooked the distinction between 2 sorts of variance that such systems may exhibit—diachronic evolution (change over time) and synchronic variation (difference between cotemporaneous instantiations of the algorithm at different sites)—and underestimated the significance of the latter. We highlight the challenges that diachronic evolution and synchronic variation present for the quality of patient care, informed consent, and equity, and discuss the complex ethical trade-offs involved in the design of such systems. (shrink)

The 1994 US spectrum auction is now a paradigmatic case of the successful use of microeconomic theory for policy-making. We use a detailed analysis of it to review standard accounts in philosophy of science of how idealized models are connected to messy reality. We show that in order to understand what made the design of the spectrum auction successful, a new such account is required, and we present it here. Of especial interest is the light this sheds on the issue (...) of progress in economics. In particular, it enables us to get clear on exactly what has been progressing, and on exactly what theory has – and has not – contributed to that. This in turn has important implications for just what it is about economic theory that we should value. (shrink)

In this paper, we take a meta-theoretical stance and aim to compare and assess two conceptual frameworks that endeavor to explain phenomenal experience. In particular, we compare Feinberg & Mallatt’s Neurobiological Naturalism (NN) and Tononi’s and colleagues' Integrated Information Theory (IIT), given that the former pointed out some similarities between the two theories (Feinberg & Mallatt 2016c-d). To probe their similarity, we first give a general introduction to both frameworks. Next, we expound a ground plan for carrying out our analysis. (...) We move on to articulate a philosophical profile of NN and IIT, addressing their ontological commitments and epistemological foundations. Finally, we compare the two point-by-point, also discussing how they stand on the issue of artificial consciousness. (shrink)

Some argue that theories of universals should incorporate structural universals, in order to allow for the metaphysical possibility of worlds of 'infinite descending complexity' ('onion worlds'). I argue that the possibility of such worlds does not establish the need for structural universals. So long as we admit the metaphysical possibility of emergent universals, there is an attractive alternative description of such cases.

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

In some sense, survival seems to be an intrinsic matter. Whether or not you survive some event seems to depend on what goes on with you yourself —what happens in the environment shouldn’t make a difference. Likewise, being a person at a time seems intrinsic. The principle that survival seems intrinsic is one factor which makes personal fission puzzles so awkward. Fission scenarios present cases where if survival is an intrinsic matter, it appears that an individual could survive twice over. (...) But it’s well known that standard notions of “intrinsicality” won’t do to articulate the sense in which survival is intrinsic, since ‘personhood’ appears to be a maximal property. We formulate a sense in which survival and personhood (and perhaps other maximal properties) may be almost intrinsic—a sense that would suffice, for example, to ground fission arguments. It turns out that this notion of almost-intrinsicality allows us to formulate a new version of the problem of the many. (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)

For the greater part of the last 50 years, it has been common for philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists to invoke the notion of realization in discussing the relationship between the mind and the brain. In traditional philosophy of mind, mental states are said to be realized, instantiated, or implemented in brain states. Artificial intelligence is sometimes described as the attempt either to model or to actually construct systems that realize some of the same psychological abilities that we and (...) other living creatures possess. The claim that specific psychological. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are “black boxes.” The initial response in the literature was a demand for “explainable AI.” However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or “interpretable” is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritizing interpretability in medical AI may constitute a “lethal prejudice.” In this paper, we defend the value of interpretability (...) in the context of the use of AI in medicine. Clinicians may prefer interpretable systems over more accurate black boxes, which in turn is sufficient to give designers of AI reason to prefer more interpretable systems in order to ensure that AI is adopted and its benefits realized. Moreover, clinicians may be justified in this preference. Achieving the downstream benefits from AI is critically dependent on how the outputs of these systems are interpreted by physicians and patients. A preference for the use of highly accurate black box AI systems, over less accurate but more interpretable systems, may itself constitute a form of lethal prejudice that may diminish the benefits of AI to—and perhaps even harm—patients. (shrink)

People sometimes use speech to interfere with other people’s speech, as in the case of a heckler sabotaging a lecture with constant interjections. Some people claim that such interference infringes upon free speech. Against this view, we argue that where competing speakers in a public forum both have an interest in speaking, free speech principles should not automatically give priority to the ‘official’ speaker. Given the ideals underlying free speech, heckling speech sometimes deserves priority. But what can we say, then, (...) about situations in which heckling clearly seems to infringe upon people’s civil liberties, in a way that intuitively justifies intervention? In such cases, we argue, heckling infringes upon people’s associative freedom. We present and defend an ethical framework for the institutional management of ‘Speech Fights’, geared around this insight. (shrink)

The wrong kind of reason (WKR) problem is a problem for attempts to analyze normative properties using only facts about the balance of normative reasons, a style of analysis on which the ‘Reasons First’ programme depends. I argue that this problem cannot be solved if the orthodox view of reasons is true --- that is, if each normative reason is numerically identical with some fact, proposition, or state-of-affairs. That’s because solving the WKR problem requires completely distinguishing between the right- and (...) wrong-kind reasons for an attitude. I argue that some facts give both right- and wrong-kind reasons for an attitude. Consequently, no such distinction between the two types of reasons is complete if reasons are facts or the like. I conclude by suggesting that reasons and facts are related by constitution, not identity. (shrink)

Why should we be means-end rational? Why care whether someone’s mental states exhibit certain formal patterns, like the ones formalized in causal decision theory? This paper establishes a dominance argument for these constraints in a finite setting. If you violate the norms of causal decision theory, then your desires will be aptness dominated. That is, there will be some alternative set of desires that you could have had, which would be more apt (closer to the actual values fixed by your (...) sensibility/ what you intrinsically care about) no matter which world is actual. If we care about having apt desires, then, we should never let ourselves violate these norms of means-end rationality. This argument shares a form with now-standard accuracy arguments for probabilism, opening up a new terrain for that discussion. I show that the foundational assumptions about the shape of accuracy and of aptness required to run the arguments for means-end rationality and for probabilism run closely parallel. I show the argument is robust under different theories of subjective actual value, including nonclassical treatments of indeterminacy in actual value; I show the argument may (but need not!) be generalized to objective theories of value. The upshot is that aptness-domination arguments for decision theories should be added to the philosophical playbook. (shrink)

We can use radically different reference‐schemes to generate the same truth‐conditions for the sentences of a language. In this paper, we do three things. (1) Distinguish two arguments that deploy this observation to derive different conclusions. The first argues that reference is radically indeterminate: there is no fact of the matter what ordinary terms refer to. This threat is taken seriously and most contemporary metasemantic theories come with resources intended to rebut it. The second argues for radical parochialism about reference: (...) it's a reflection of our parochial interests, rather than the nature of the subject matter, that our theorizing about language appeals to reference rather than another relation that generates the same truth‐conditions. Rebuttals of the first argument cut no ice against the second, because radical parochialism is compatible with reference being determinate. (2) Argue that radical parochialism, like radical indeterminacy, would be shocking if true. (3) Argue that the case for radical parochialism turns on the explanatory purposes of “reference”‐talk: on relatively “thin” conceptions, the argument goes through, and radical parochialism is (shockingly!) true; on richer conceptions, the argument can be blocked. We conclude that non‐revisionists must endorse, and justify, a relatively rich conception of the explanatory purposes of “reference”‐talk. (shrink)

In the same spirit with the theme of last issue of this SGJ journal (“Ongoing creation”), this paper shortly reviews a plausible mechanism from Aether to become ordinary matter from the perspective of Neutrosophic Logic. We also discuss two other possible applications of Neutrosophic Logic, including a resolution of conflicting paradigms in medicine. We hope that some ideas as outlined herein will be proved useful in the near future.

How are permutation arguments for the inscrutability of reference to be formulated in the context of a Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics? Davidson takes these arguments to establish that there are no grounds for favouring a reference scheme that assigns London to “Londres”, rather than one that assigns Sydney to that name. We shall see, however, that it is far from clear whether permutation arguments work when set out in the context of the kind of truth-theoretic semantics which Davidson favours. The principle (...) required to make the argument work allows us to resurrect Foster problems against the Davidsonian position. The Foster problems and the permutation inscrutability problems stand or fall together: they are one puzzle, not two. (shrink)

Smarandache Hypothesis states that there is no speed limit of anything, including light and particles. While the idea is quite simple and based on known hypothesis of quantum mechanics, called Einstein-Podolski-Rosen paradox, in reality such a superluminal physics seems still hard to accept by majority of physicists. Here we review some experiments to support superluminal physics and also findings to explain Smarandache Quantum Paradoxes and Quantum Sorites Paradox. We also touch briefly on new experiment on magneton, supporting SubQuantum Kinetic Model (...) of Electron. (shrink)

Some rules seem more important than others. The moral rule to keep promises seems more important than the aesthetic rule not to wear brown with black or the pool rule not to scratch on the eight ball. A worrying number of metaethicists are increasingly tempted to explain this difference by appealing to something they call “authoritative normativity” – it’s because moral rules are “authoritatively normatively” that they are especially important. The authors of this chapter argue for three claims concerning “authoritative (...) normativity”: (1) that motivation for it originates in a parochial conception of “normative flavours”; (2) that arguments against alternative ways of explaining e.g., morality’s importance are overblown; and (3) that there are strong reasons against theorizing in terms of “authoritative normativity”. The overarching aim is not to show that “authoritative normativity” is incoherent or entirely unmotivated. Rather, it is to discuss some of “authoritative normativity’s” deeper commitments to correct the impression that is it largely benign or that it is entailed by familiar and popular “metanormative” positions. Authoritative normativity, it seems to us, is a solution in search of a problem. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether search engines and other new modes of online communication should be covered by free speech principles. It criticizes the analogical reason-ing that contemporary American courts and scholars have used to liken search engines to newspapers, and to extend free speech coverage to them based on that likeness. There are dissimilarities between search engines and newspapers that undermine the key analogy, and also rival analogies that can be drawn which don’t recommend free speech protection for search engines. (...) Partly on these bases, we argue that an analogical approach to questions of free speech coverage is of limited use in this context. Credible verdicts about how free speech principles should apply to new modes of online com-munication require us to re-excavate the normative foundations of free speech. This method for deciding free speech coverage suggests that only a subset of search engine outputs and similar online communication should receive special protection against government regulation. (shrink)

This article examines the domestic use of drones by law enforcement to gather information. Although the use of drones for surveillance will undoubtedly provide law enforcement agencies with new means of gathering intelligence, these unmanned aircrafts bring with them a host of legal and epistemic complications. Part I considers the Fourth Amendment and the different legal standards of proof that might apply to law enforcement drone use. Part II explores philosopher Wittgenstein’s notion of actional certainty as a means to interpret (...) citizens' expectations of privacy with regard to their patterns of movement over time. Part III discusses how the theory of actional certainty can apply to the epistemic challenge of determining what is a “reasonable” expectation of privacy under the law. This Part also investigates the Mosaic Theory as a possible reading of the Fourth Amendment. (shrink)

Does consciousness survive bodily death? This question remains a profound, perennial mystery. Although scientific studies have focused on out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs), there is scant evidence to support the claim that consciousness survives death. Many speculative theories state that consciousness moves through various afterlife realities. Tantalizing clues are found in world religion, esoteric philosophy, extrasensory perception, hypnotic regression, and scientific experimentation. At the present time, there is an abundance of theoretical scholarly discourse on the topic of “survival.” (...) After 60 years of NDE research, common ground has been established from NDEers’ anecdotal evidence and perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Those who endorse the Psychological Continuity Approach (PCA) to analyzing personal identity need to impose a non-branching constraint to get the intuitively correct result that in the case of fission, one person becomes two. With the help of Brueckner's (2005) discussion, it is shown here that the sort of non-branching clause that allows proponents of PCA to provide sufficient conditions for being the same person actually runs contrary to the very spirit of their theory. The problem is first presented in (...) connection with perdurantist versions of PCA. The difficulty is then shown to apply to endurantist versions as well. (shrink)