Many cognitive scientists, having discovered that some computational-level characterization f of a cognitive capacity φ is intractable, invoke heuristics as algorithmic-level explanations of how cognizers compute f. We argue that such explanations are actually dysfunctional, and rebut five possible objections. We then propose computational-level theory revision as a principled and workable alternative.

Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their models, but only act as if they do. Whether or not the problem (...) of intractability is solved by recourse to ‘as if’ explanations critically depends, inter alia, on the semantics of the ‘as if’ connective. We examine the five most sensible explications in the literature, and conclude that none of them circumvents the problem. As a result, rational ‘as if’ explanations must obey the minimal computational constraint of tractability. (shrink)

Advancement in cognitive science depends, in part, on doing some occasional ‘theoretical housekeeping’. We highlight some conceptual confusions lurking in an important attempt at explaining the human capacity for rational or coherent thought: Thagard & Verbeurgt’s computational-level model of humans’ capacity for making reasonable and truth-conducive abductive inferences (1998; Thagard, 2000). Thagard & Verbeurgt’s model assumes that humans make such inferences by computing a coherence function (f_coh), which takes as input representation networks and their pair-wise constraints and gives as output (...) a partition into accepted (A) and rejected (R) elements that maximizes the weight of satisfied constraints. We argue that their proposal gives rise to at least three difficult problems. (shrink)

The early history of string theory is marked by a shift from strong interaction physics to quantum gravity. The first string models and associated theoretical framework were formulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the S-matrix program for the strong interactions. In the mid-1970s, the models were reinterpreted as a potential theory unifying the four fundamental forces. This paper provides a historical analysis of how string theory was developed out of S-matrix physics, aiming to clarify (...) how modern string theory, as a theory detached from experimental data, grew out of an S-matrix program that was strongly dependent upon observable quantities. Surprisingly, the theoretical practice of physicists already turned away from experiment before string theory was recast as a potential unified quantum gravity theory. With the formulation of dual resonance models (the “hadronic string theory”), physicists were able to determine almost all of the models' parameters on the basis of theoretical reasoning. It was this commitment to “non-arbitrariness”, i.e., a lack of free parameters in the theory, that initially drove string theorists away from experimental input, and not the practical inaccessibility of experimental data in the context of quantum gravity physics. This is an important observation when assessing the role of experimental data in string theory. (shrink)

Where did the universe come from? Is life a result of chance, or design? If God is loving and all-powerful, why does evil still exist? Is religious belief just a byproduct of undirected evolutionary processes? Or did God make sure humans would evolve in such a way as to believe? Are philosophers closed-minded about religion? And why is so much of philosophy of religion about God-but not about gods? Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion introduces students to some of the (...) major traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. It also includes discussions of some less well-known, but thought-provoking arguments for the existence of God, and one of the most important new challenges to religious belief from the Cognitive Science of Religion. An introductory chapter traces the deep interconnections between philosophy and religion throughout Western history, and a final chapter considers what place there is for non-Western and non-monotheistic religions within contemporary philosophy of religion. Whatever your religious beliefs-or lack of beliefs-we think you will find many of the arguments in this book fascinating to think about, and useful starting points for deeper philosophical discussions. (shrink)

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the restrictive measures implemented for its control, may considerably affect people’s lives particularly vulnerable persons such as children, elderly and people with underlying diseases. This study aimed to assess the well-being of Vietnamese people after COVID-19 lockdown measures were lifted and life gradually returned to normal in Vietnam. Methods: An online survey was organized from 21 st to 25 th April 2020 among Vietnamese residents aged 18 and over. Data were collected concerning the participants’ health (...) status, COVID-19 preventive behaviour, and consequences of the preventive measures. The WHO-5 Well-Being Index was used to score participants’ well-being. Results: A total of 1922 responses were analyzed (mean age was 31 years; range: 18-76). Factors associated with a high well-being score included older age, eating healthy food, practising physical exercise, working from home, and adherence to the COVID-19 preventive measures. Female participants, persons worried about their relatives’ health, and smokers were more likely to have a low well-being score. Conclusions: The Vietnamese people continued to follow COVID-19 preventive measures even after the lockdown was lifted. Most respondents scored high on the well-being scale. However, the emergence of a new COVID-19 outbreak with an epicenter in Da Nang city is expected to increase public anxiety and mental health problems. It is clear that together with preventive measures, developing strategies to guarantee the well-being of the Vietnamese people’s is equally important. (shrink)

Two central accounts of human cognition emerge over the course of the Middle Ages: the theory of divine illumination and an Aristotelian theory centered on abstraction from sense data. Typically, these two accounts are seen as competing views of the origins of human knowledge; theories of divine illumination focus on God’s direct intervention in our epistemic lives, whereas Aristotelian theories generally claim that our knowledge derives primarily (or even entirely) from sense perception. In this paper, I address an early attempt (...) to reconcile these two accounts—namely, Robert Grosseteste’s commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics—and I argue that Grosseteste’s efforts to bring Aristotle’s account of human cognition into harmony with a theory of divine illumination proves both philosophically interesting and largely successful. Grosseteste’s claim that God does not directly illumine our intellects in this life opens his theory to the worry that Grosseteste leaves the divine out of his theory of divine illumination in the CPA. Steven Marrone, for example, holds that Grosseteste’s Aristotelian focus in this work causes him to abandon the theory of divine illumination he advocated in the earlier De veritate in favor of a modified theory of “human” illumination. I argue in contrast that Grosseteste does give God a role in human knowledge in the CPA—a role that allows human beings to remain largely responsible for the acquisition of knowledge while still requiring God’s illumination for actual cognition. In short, I conclude that, although human bodies interfere with God’s direct illumination of our intellects, God nevertheless plays a crucial ideogenic role in human cognition by illuminating the objects of our intellection and making them intelligible to us. (shrink)

The reintroduction of Aristotle's Analytics to the Latin West—in particular, the reintroduction of the Posterior Analytics—forever altered the course of medieval epistemological discussions. Although the Analytics fell decidedly from grace in later centuries, the sophisticated account of human cognition developed in the Posterior Analytics appealed so strongly to thirteenth-century European scholars that it became one of the two central theories of knowledge advocated in the later Middle Ages. Robert Grosseteste's 'Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libro', written in the 1220s, is (...) most likely the first complete Latin commentary on the Posterior Analytics. As the thirteenth century wore on, Aristotle’s account of human cognition was generally set in opposition to the Augustinian-influenced theory of divine illumination that was de rigueur in the early thirteenth century. Although common consensus holds that this pattern of opposition was set already in Grosseteste’s CPA, I argue that the story of the Posterior Analytics’s early reception is, in fact, quite different. In particular, I maintain that, rather than seeing himself as forced to choose between his earlier theory of divine illumination and the “new” Aristotelian epistemology, Grosseteste is perfectly content to blend and bring together the diverse elements of these systems and to present a consciously synthetic rather than adversarial picture of these differing accounts of human cognition. (shrink)

Three puzzles about self-deception make this mental phenomenon an intriguing explanatory target. The first relates to how to define it without paradox; the second is about how to make sense of self-deception in light of the interpretive view of the mental that has become widespread in philosophy; and the third concerns why it exists at all. In this paper I address the first and third puzzles. First, I define self-deception. Second, I criticize Robert Trivers' attempt to use adaptionist evolutionary (...) psychology to solve the third puzzle (existence). Third, I sketch a theory to replace that of Trivers. Self-deception is not an adaptation, but a spandrel in the sense that Gould and Lewontin give the term: a byproduct of other features of human (cognitive) architecture. Self-deception is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. (Allen Wood, 1988). (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen famously offers a version of the luck objection to libertarianism called the ‘Rollback Argument.’ It involves a thought experiment in which God repeatedly rolls time backward to provide an agent with many opportunities to act in the same circumstance. Because the agent has the kind of freedom that affords her alternative possibilities at the moment of choice, she performs different actions in some of these opportunities. The upshot is that whichever action she performs in the actual-sequence is (...) intuitively a matter of mere chance. I explore a new response to the Rollback Argument. If there are true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom, then the agent performs the same action each time she is placed in the same circumstance, because that is what she would freely do in that circumstance. This response appears to negate the chancy intuition. Ultimately, however, I argue that this new response is unsuccessful, because there is a variant of the Rollback Argument that presents the same basic challenge to the libertarian on the assumption that there are true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom. Thus, true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom do not provide the libertarian with a solution to the Rollback Argument. (shrink)

I raise the question of what cognitive attitude self-deception brings about. That is: what is the product of self-deception? Robert Audi and Georges Rey have argued that self-deception does not bring about belief in the usual sense, but rather “avowal” or “avowed belief.” That means a tendency to affirm verbally (both privately and publicly) that lacks normal belief-like connections to non-verbal actions. I contest their view by discussing cases in which the product of self-deception is implicated in action in (...) a way that exemplifies the motivational role of belief. Furthermore, by applying independent criteria of what it is for a mental state to be a belief, I defend the more intuitive view that being self-deceived that p entails believing that p. Beliefs (i) are the default for action relative to other cognitive attitudes (such as imagining and hypothesis) and (ii) have cognitive governance over the other cognitive attitudes. I explicate these two relations and argue that they obtain for the product of self-deception. (shrink)

Here I review Robert Trivers' 2011 book _The Folly of Fools_, in which he advocates the evolutionary theory of deceit and self-deception that he pioneered in his famous preface to Richard Dawkins' _Selfish Gene_. Although the book contains a wealth of interesting discussion on topics ranging from warfare to immunology, I find it lacking on two major fronts. First, it fails to give a proper argument for its central thesis--namely, that self-deception evolved to facilitate deception of others. Second, the (...) book lacks conceptual clarity with respect to the focal term "self-deception.". (shrink)

Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the (...) frameworks and practices of cognitive scientists of religion. Employing philosophical tools as well as drawing on case studies, contributions not only illuminate psychological experiments, anthropological observations and neurophysical research relevant to understanding religious phenomena, they allow cognitive scientists to either heed or clarify their position in relation to Wittgenstein's objections. By developing and responding to his criticisms, Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion offers novel perspectives on his philosophy in relation to religion, human nature, and the mind. Contents: Introduction (Robert Vinten); Ch.1: 'Wittgenstein, Concepts, and Human Nature' (Roger Trigg); Ch.2: 'On Truth, Language, and Objectivity' (Florian Franken Figueiredo); Ch.3 'Pascal Boyer's Miscellany of Homunculi: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Religion Explained' (Robert Vinten); Ch.4 'The Brain Perceives/Infers' (Hans van Eyghen); Ch.5 'The Imaginary Inner Inside Cognitive Science of Religion' (Christopher Hoyt); Ch.6 'Cognitive Theories and Wittgenstein: Looking for Convergence not for Divergence' (Olympia Panagiotidou); Ch. 7 'Wittgenstein, Naturalism, and Interpreting Religious Phenomena' (Thomas Carroll); Ch.8 'Natural Thoughts and Unnatural Oughts: Lessing, Wittgenstein, and Contemporary CSR' (Guy Axtell); Ch.9 'Normative Cognition in Cognitive Science of Religion' (Mark Addis); Ch.10 'Brains as the Source of Being: Mind/Brain Focus and the Western Model of Mind in Dominant Cognitive Science Discourse' (Rita McNamara); Ch.11 'On Religious Practices as Multiscale Active Inference: Certainties Emerging From Recurrent Interactions Within and Across Individuals and Groups' (Inês Hipólito and Casper Hesp). (shrink)

Dieser Band stellt die erste Fortsetzung der 2013 begonnenen Publikation zur „Wirtlichen Ökonomie“ dar. Er dient der sich fortsetzenden Frage nach der Wirtlichkeit. Zu dieser Frage gehört es, das Ökonomische aus einer notwendig gewordenen Zurückhaltung gegenüber dem methodischen Vorgriff der modernen Wirtschaftswissenschaften zu denken. Die Zurückhaltung verleiht, indem sie den Fragebereich der Wirtlichkeit eröffnet, den hier versammelten Beiträgen ihren wahren Zusammenhang.

This is my reply to Josh Weisberg, Robert Van Gulick, and William Seager, published in JCS vol 20, 2013. This symposium grew out of an author-meets-critics session at the Central APA conference in 2013 on my 2012 book THE CONSCIOUSNESS PARADOX (MIT Press). Topics covered include higher-order thought (HOT) theory, my own "wide intrinsicality view," the problem of misrepresentation, targetless HOTs, conceptualism, introspection, and the transitivity principle.

In some recent articles, Cobreros, Egré, Ripley, & van Rooij have defended the idea that abandoning transitivity may lead to a solution to the trouble caused by semantic paradoxes. For that purpose, they develop the Strict-Tolerant approach, which leads them to entertain a nontransitive theory of truth, where the structural rule of Cut is not generally valid. However, that Cut fails in general in the target theory of truth does not mean that there are not certain safe instances of (...) Cut involving semantic notions. In this article we intend to meet the challenge of answering how to regain all the safe instances of Cut, in the language of the theory, making essential use of a unary recovery operator. To fulfill this goal, we will work within the so-called Goodship Project, which suggests that in order to have nontrivial naïve theories it is sufficient to formulate the corresponding self-referential sentences with suitable biconditionals. Nevertheless, a secondary aim of this article is to propose a novel way to carry this project out, showing that the biconditionals in question can be totally classical. In the context of this article, these biconditionals will be essentially used in expressing the self-referential sentences and, thus, as a collateral result of our work we will prove that none of the recoveries expected of the target theory can be nontrivially achieved if self-reference is expressed through identities. (shrink)

Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumption is implausible, as updating beliefs with conditional information does (...) not in general preserve independencies. We conclude that the approach taken by van Rooij and Lassiter does not succeed in resolving the proviso problem. (shrink)

Paraconsistent logics are logical systems that reject the classical principle, usually dubbed Explosion, that a contradiction implies everything. However, the received view about paraconsistency focuses only the inferential version of Explosion, which is concerned with formulae, thereby overlooking other possible accounts. In this paper, we propose to focus, additionally, on a meta-inferential version of Explosion, i.e. which is concerned with inferences or sequents. In doing so, we will offer a new characterization of paraconsistency by means of which a logic is (...) paraconsistent if it invalidates either the inferential or the meta-inferential notion of Explosion. We show the non-triviality of this criterion by discussing a number of logics. On the one hand, logics which validate and invalidate both versions of Explosion, such as classical logic and Asenjo–Priest’s 3-valued logic LP. On the other hand, logics which validate one version of Explosion but not the other, such as the substructural logics TS and ST, introduced by Malinowski and Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij, which are obtained via Malinowski’s and Frankowski’s q- and p-matrices, respectively. (shrink)

Recent scoreboard models of conversation, in addition to modeling update effects of assertions and questions, also make sense of how one may react to such discourse moves. An account of acceptance and rejection is captured by Farkas & Bruce (2010), while Bledin & Rawlins (2020) have recently made sense of how one may resist an assertion too. For rejection and resistance of assertions, truth comes out to be a crucial notion. Between X and Y, if Y doesn't believe p to (...) be true, then Y might resist or reject X's assertion of p. For questions however, truth cannot serve this purpose. A complete model of discourse would seek to offer explanation of resisting questions. Much like Bledin & Rawlins, one can non-exhaustively enumerate a class of resistance moves. In many ways, one can resist a request to make a particular question QUD. In this paper, we raise following question: which notion can serve to explain question uptake in discourse? In our paper, we show how the expected utility value (EUV) of questions can serve this role for questions. EUV is used by van Rooij (2003) to give an account of interpretation of questions; we think it can serve our intended purposes too. To demonstrate plausibility, we build a workable formalism. (shrink)

As is well known, research on generics is represented by three approaches: majority- based (Cohen 1996, 1999, 2004), normalcy-based (Nickel 2006; 2009; 2010a, b; 2013; 2016; 2018), and cognition-based (Leslie 2007a, b; 2008; 2013; 2017) approaches. Two recent approaches proposed by van Rooij and Schulz (2020) and Tessler and Goodman (2019) are more elaborated theories on generics, although neither of these approaches nor the three representative theories can fully account for various generics data, as argued by Yoon (2021). On (...) the other hand, Nguyen (2020) proposes another theory of generics, the so-called ‘radical’ theory, which argues that the generic operator has no semantic content, and that the various quantificational interpretations of bare plural generics are determined contextually. In this context, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of some recently published analyses, including Nguyen’s theory, and to analyze non-conventionalized generics. While conventionalized or conceptualized generics have received much attention from researchers, non- conventionalized generics have not been studied as extensively. It will be argued that Nguyen’s theory simply transfers the burden onto pragmatics, and that non- conventionalized as well as conventionalized generics tend to be interpreted based on people’s perceptions of their exceptions, in line with Yoon (2021). This position will be supported by experimental results. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that, just as in recent years Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij have provided a non-transitive counterpart of classical logic (i.e. one in which all classically acceptable inferences are valid but Cut and other metainferences are not), the same can be done for every Tarskian logic, with full generality. To establish this fact, a semantic approach is taken by showing that appropriate structures can be devised to characterize a non-transitive counterpart of (...) every Tarskian logic, starting from the logical matrices that are usually taken to render them. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's Direct Argument (DA) purports to establish the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, without appealing to the notion of avoidability, a notion on whose analysis compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree. Van Inwagen intended DA to refute compatibilism, or at least to shift the burden of proof onto the compatibilist. In this paper, we offer a critical assessment of DA. We examine a variety of objections to DA due to John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Ishtiyaque Haji, Seth Shabo, Michael (...) McKenna, and David Widerker. We divide these objections into those based on dialectical considerations (section 1), and objections in the form of counterexamples to a central principle which the Direct Argument employs (sec 2). The conclusion we reach is that the proponent of DA can deal plausibly with these objections, thus establishing DA as a powerful argument in favor of incompatibilism. (shrink)

Sometimes you make a choice. Whether or not you made it was up to you. The choice was free. But how can this be? A scientific view of the world may leave no room for free choice. Free will literature continually explodes. Yet experts still focus on control or on a power to do otherwise. Sadly, they neglect another intuitive feature of free will: being an underived source or ultimate originator. When acting freely, one is a self-determined, self-directed, sole author (...) of change. Surprisingly, though the literature is replete with this pre-theoretic feature of free will, virtually no one makes rigorous use of it when constructing arguments. Equipped with fresh research, this book contends that agent-causation—currently an unpopular theory—deserves serious reconsideration. Only agent-causation accounts for ultimate origination, and popular objections fail under rigorous scrutiny. This book is tightly argued. It challenges and deepens recent advances in free will scholarship made by Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Randy Clarke, Stewart Goetz, Tim O’Connor, and others. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's Direct Argument (DA) purports to establish the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, without appealing to the notion of avoidability, a notion on whose analysis compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree. Van Inwagen intended DA to refute compatibilism, or at least to shift the burden of proof onto the compatibilist. In this paper, we offer a critical assessment of DA. We examine a variety of objections to DA due to John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Ishtiyaque Haji, Seth Shabo, Michael (...) McKenna, and David Widerker. We divide these objections into those based on dialectical considerations (section 1), and objections in the form of counterexamples to a central principle which the Direct Argument employs (sec 2). The conclusion we reach is that the proponent of DA can deal plausibly with these objections, thus establishing DA as a powerful argument in favor of incompatibilism. (shrink)

I here sketch a reply to Peter van Inwagen’s Rollback Argument, which suggests that libertarian accounts of free agency are beset by problems involving luck. Van Inwagen imagines an indeterministic agent whose universe is repeatedly ‘rolled back’ by God to the time of her choice. Since the agent’s choice is indeterministic, her choices are sometimes di erent in the imaginary rollback scenarios. I show that although this is true, this need not impair her control over what she does. I develop (...) an account of when and why the fact that an agent would choose di erently impairs control, which provides a novel response to the Rollback Argument. (shrink)

In replying to certain objections to the existence of God, Robert Adams, Bruce Langtry, and Peter van Inwagen assume that God can appropriately choose a suboptimal world, a world less good than some other world God could have chosen. A number of philosophers, such as Michael Slote and Klaas Kraay, claim that these theistic replies are therefore committed to the claim that satisficing can be appropriate. Kraay argues that this commitment is a significant liability. I argue, however, that the (...) relevant defenses of theism are committed to the appropriateness of, not satisficing, but motivated submaximization. When one submaximizes with motivation, one aims at the optimum but accepts the good enough because of a countervailing consideration. When one satisfices, one aims at the good enough and chooses the good enough because it realizes her aim at the good enough. While commitment to the appropriateness of satisficing may be a significant liability, commitment to the appropriateness of motivated submaximization is not. (shrink)

I will begin this comparative analysis with Quine, focusing on the front matter and first chapter of Word and Object (alongside From a Logical Point of View and two other short pieces), attempting to illuminate there a (1) basis of excessive, yet familiar, chaos, (2) method of improvised, dramatic distortion, and (3) consequent neo-Pragmatist metaphysics. Having elaborated this Quinian basis, method and metaphysics, I will then show that they can be productively translated into James Mercer’s poetic lyrics for The Shins, (...) with an emphasis on the first song, entitled “Caring is Creepy,” from their debut studio album, Oh, Inverted World! Finally, I will explain why Quine and Mercer are particularly suited to this translation (in contrast to other philosophically-rich pop lyricists such as Bob Dylan, and other pragmatist philosophers like Robert Brandom), in the course of which important implications will emerge for our globalized world today. (shrink)

This paper investigates a well-known case of simultaneous discovery in twentieth-century chemistry, the origins of the concept of hybridisation, in the light of Kuhn's insights. There has been no ambiguity as to who discovered this concept, when it was "rst in print, and how important it was. The full-#edged form of the concept was published in 1931 independently by two American scientists John C. Slater (1900}1976) and Linus Pauling (1901}1994), although both of them had made their ideas public earlier: Slater (...) at the American Physical Society meetings in 1930, and Pauling in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1928. Slater and Pauling both argued for the necessity of using an s orbital as well as three p orbitals in the carbon atom in order to explain carbon's four valences and the tetrahedral structure of methane. The metaphor &hybridisation' for denoting this mix of s and p orbitals was "rst used by Robert S. Mulliken and J. H. Van Vleck before gaining currency with the scienti"c community around 1935.2 The concept of hybridisation was indeed indispensable for extending the quantum-mechanical interpretation of the chemical bond as an electron pairing from diatomic molecules to polyatomic ones. To be sure, the emergence of hybridisation attests to scientists' growing interest in exploring the borderland between physics and chemistry, a trend that led to the creation of physical chemistry in the late nineteenth century and of chemical physics and quantum chemistry in the 1920s and 30s. Slater and Pauling themselves experienced and on many occasions talked about the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research; and historians have legitimately illuminated their works by examining them in this broad context.3 Yet the careful analysis of their research notes and published papers reveals that Slater and Pauling were working in quite disparate disciplinary traditions, with di!erent approaches, for di!erent audiences, and towards di!erent goals. The aim of this paper is to explore their di!erent routes to a common destination*hybridisation*and thereby to explicate tensions existing between physics and chemistry amidst the institutional and conceptual overlapping of the two disciplines. (shrink)

En este artículo introductorio al número especial “Desacuerdos Profundos: Precisiones y Exploraciones”, se presentan los artículos que comprenden este número brindando contexto a sus distintas temáticas, las cuales van desde la naturaleza de los desacuerdos profundos y su resolución, hasta sus conexiones con debates filosóficos y fenómenos sociales.

This volume considers challenges to forgiveness in the most difficult circumstances, such as in criminal justice contexts, when the victim is dead or when bystanders disagree, and when anger and resentment seem preferable and important. Contributing philosophers include Myisha Cherry, Jonathan Jacobs, Barrett Emerick, Alice MacLachlan, David McNaughton and Eve Garrard. Contributing psychologists include Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Robert D. Enright and Mary Jacqueline Song, C. Ward Struthers, Joshua Guilfoyle, Careen Khoury, Elizabeth van Monsjou, Joni Sasaki, Curtis Phills, Rebecca Young, and (...) Zdravko Marjanovic. (shrink)

In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of (...) particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use. After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and taxonomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technologies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies. (shrink)

Libertarianism is a theory of justice that places significant moral weight on exclusive property rights. On this basis, many libertarian philosophers, from Robert Nozick to Michael Huemer, criticize any form of income redistribution. Ironically, some libertarians, following Philippe Van Parijs, Matt Zwolinski, and Charles Murray, have supported the introduction of an unconditional basic income. This essay seeks to prove that this support is not just a political compromise. By contrast, libertarian justice advocates have a strong moral basis for supporting (...) income redistribution in the form of unconditional cash payments. This essay explores one such reason, the Lockean proviso. The Lockean proviso is a moral requirement for the appropriation of unowned resources to leave “enough and as good” for others. There are many interpretations of the Lockean proviso, but the most ambitious are the egalitarian proviso and the sufficiency proviso. Each of them, but for different reasons, requires the introduction of a basic income. The egalitarian proviso establishes the equal rights of all people to natural resources, and therefore requires that all benefits from the ownership of natural resources be shared egalitarianly — in the form of unconditional equal payments. The sufficiency proviso establishes some threshold of sufficiency, and then imposes a restriction on exclusive property rights so that they can’t prevent redistribution in order to raise all people to the threshold of sufficiency. However, while both provisos require a basic income, they diverge on three important dimensions in assessing this basic income: applicability, taxable base, and amount of cash payments. (shrink)

What, if anything, do we epistemically owe to each other? Various “traditional” views of epistemology might hold either that we don’t epistemically owe anything to each other, because “what we owe to each other” is the realm of the moral, or that what we epistemically owe to each other is just to be epistemically responsible agents. Basu (2019) has recently argued, against such views, that morality makes extra-epistemic demands upon what we should believe about one another. So, what we owe (...) to each other is not just a matter of word and deed, but also of belief. And in fact, Basu argues, sometimes those moral demands require us to believe in ways that cut against orthodox epistemic norms. This paper has three aims. First, to offer two strategies for accommodating the kinds of cases Basu discusses while nonetheless holding that only epistemic normativity makes demands on belief. Second, to offer an alternative account of what we owe to each other that does not hold that morality demands that we sometimes believe against our evidence or in violation of epistemic norms. And third, to give a brief diagnosis of why it seems intuitive that morality makes extra-epistemic doxastic demands on us. Ultimately, I argue that what we epistemically owe to each other does not require us to violate orthodox, invariantist epistemic norms. Morality demands that we have a proper regard for others, not that we sometimes believe against our evidence. (shrink)

This is an introductory article on sociobiology, particularly its relationship to eugenics. Sociobiology developed in the 1960s as a field within evolutionary biology to explain human social traits and behaviours. Although sociobiology has few direct connections to eugenics, it shares eugenics’ optimistic enthusiasm for extending biological science into the human domain, often with reckless sensationalism. Sociobiology's critics have argued that sociobiology also propagates a kind of genetic determinism and represents the zealous misapplication of science beyond its proper reach that characterized (...) the eugenics movement. More recently, evolutionary psychology represents a sophistication of sociobiology that attends to the mind as the "missing link" between evolution and behaviour (Cosmides and Tooby 1992, Pinker 1997). (shrink)

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky illustrates that encounters with evil do not solely impact agents’ beliefs about God (or God’s existence). Evil impacts people on an emotional level as well. Authors like Hasker and van Inwagen sometimes identify the emotional impact of evil with the “existential” problem of evil. For better or worse, the existential version of the problem is often set aside in contemporary philosophical discussions. In this essay, I rely on Robert Roberts’ account of emotions as “concern-based (...) construals” to show that theistic philosophers can effectively address the existential problem (and so, the problem should not be set aside). In fact, addressing the emotional impact of evil is crucial, I argue, given that resolving just the impact of evil on agents’ beliefs about God constitutes an incomplete response to the problem of evil. (shrink)

I identify two versions of the scientific anti-realist’s selectionist explanation for the success of science: Bas van Fraassen’s original and K. Brad Wray’s newer interpretation. In Wray’s version, psycho-social factors internal to the scientific community – viz. scientists’ interests, goals, and preferences – explain the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success. I argue that, if Wray’s version were correct, then science should resemble art. In art, the artwork-selection practices that explain artwork-success appear faddish. They are prone to radical change over time. (...) Theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science are however not faddish. They are mostly stable; that is, long-lived and consistent over time. This is because scientists (explicitly or implicitly) subscribe to what I will call the testability norm: scientific theories must make falsifiable claims about the external physical world. The testability norm and not psycho-sociology explains the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science. Contra Wray, scientific anti-realists can then maintain that the external physical world (as expressed in the testability norm) explains theory-success. (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)

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...) types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

Sometimes it is indeterminate what an agent morally ought do. This generates a Decision Ought Challenge—to give moral guidance to agents in such a scenario. This article is a field guide to the options for a theory of the decision ought for cases of indeterminacy. Three categories of view are evaluated, and the best representative for each is identified.

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

This fourteenth volume of Collected Papers is an eclectic tome of 87 papers in Neutrosophics and other fields, such as mathematics, fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, picture fuzzy sets, information fusion, robotics, statistics, or extenics, comprising 936 pages, published between 2008-2022 in different scientific journals or currently in press, by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 99 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 26 countries: Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Adesina Abdul Akeem Agboola, Akbar Rezaei, Shariful Alam, Marina Alonso, Fran Andujar, (...) Toshinori Asai, Assia Bakali, Azmat Hussain, Daniela Baran, Bijan Davvaz, Bilal Hadjadji, Carlos Díaz Bohorquez, Robert N. Boyd, M. Caldas, Cenap Özel, Pankaj Chauhan, Victor Christianto, Salvador Coll, Shyamal Dalapati, Irfan Deli, Balasubramanian Elavarasan, Fahad Alsharari, Yonfei Feng, Daniela Gîfu, Rafael Rojas Gualdrón, Haipeng Wang, Hemant Kumar Gianey, Noel Batista Hernández, Abdel-Nasser Hussein, Ibrahim M. Hezam, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Muthusamy Karthika, Nour Eldeen M. Khalifa, Madad Khan, Kifayat Ullah, Valeri Kroumov, Tapan Kumar Roy, Deepesh Kunwar, Le Thi Nhung, Pedro López, Mai Mohamed, Manh Van Vu, Miguel A. Quiroz-Martínez, Marcel Migdalovici, Kritika Mishra, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Mohamed Talea, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohammed Alshumrani, Mohamed Loey, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Shabir, Mumtaz Ali, Nassim Abbas, Munazza Naz, Ngan Thi Roan, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Rishwanth Mani Parimala, Ion Pătrașcu, Surapati Pramanik, Quek Shio Gai, Qiang Guo, Rajab Ali Borzooei, Nimitha Rajesh, Jesús Estupiñan Ricardo, Juan Miguel Martínez Rubio, Saeed Mirvakili, Arsham Borumand Saeid, Saeid Jafari, Said Broumi, Ahmed A. Salama, Nirmala Sawan, Gheorghe Săvoiu, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Seok-Zun Song, Shahzaib Ashraf, Jayant Singh, Rajesh Singh, Son Hoang Le, Tahir Mahmood, Kenta Takaya, Mirela Teodorescu, Ramalingam Udhayakumar, Maikel Y. Leyva Vázquez, V. Venkateswara Rao, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Gabriela Vlădeanu, Michael Voskoglou, Yaser Saber, Yong Deng, You He, Youcef Chibani, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Hongbo Wang, Zayen Azzouz Omar. (shrink)

There is a largely unrecognized ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation throws into relief two fundamentally different conceptions of a trope and provides two ways to understand and develop each metaphysical theory that put tropes to use. In this paper I consider the relative merits that result from differences concerning a trope’s ability to ground the character of ordinary objects. I argue that on each conception of a trope, there are unique implications and challenges concerning character-grounding.

Multisensory processing encompasses all of the various ways in which the presence of information in one sensory modality can adaptively influence the processing of information in a different modality. In Part I of this survey article, I begin by presenting a cartography of some of the more extensively investigated forms of multisensory processing, with a special focus on two distinct types of multisensory integration. I briefly discuss the conditions under which these different forms of multisensory processing occur as well as (...) their important perceptual consequences and interrelations. In Part II, I then turn to examining of some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multisensory consciousness for philosophical attempts to individuate the senses. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Michael Loux’s important distinction between “tropes” and “tropers”. First, I argue that the distinction throws into relief an ambiguity and discrepancy in the literature, revealing two fundamentally different versions of trope theory. Second, I argue that the distinction brings into focus unique challenges facing each of the resulting trope theories, thus calling into question an alleged advantage of trope theory—that by uniquely occupying the middle ground between its rivals, trope theory is able to recover and (...) preserve the insights of these views. Ultimately, the distinction suggests that trope theory is a divided house. (shrink)

This paper is a critical discussion of John Dupré's recent defence of promiscuous realism in Part 1 of his The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. It also discusses some more general issues in the philosophy of biology and science. Dupré's chief strategy of argumentation appeals to debates within the philosophy of biology, all of which concern the nature of species. While the strategy is well motivated, I argue that Dupré's challenge to essentialist and unificationist views (...) about natural kinds is not successful. One conclusion is that an integrative conception of species is a real alternative to Dupré's pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper, I claim that extant empirical data do not support a radically embodied understanding of the mind but, instead, suggest (along with a variety of other results) a massively representational view. According to this massively representational view, the brain is rife with representations that possess overlapping and redundant content, and many of these represent other mental representations or derive their content from them. Moreover, many behavioral phenomena associated with attention and consciousness are best explained by the coordinated activity (...) of units with redundant content. I finish by arguing that this massively representational picture challenges the reliability of a priori theorizing about consciousness. (shrink)

We distinguish between two different strategies in methodology of economics. The big picture strategy, dominant in the twentieth century, ascribed to economics a unified method and evaluated this m...

This paper makes the case for arms control regimes to govern the development and deployment of autonomous weapon systems and long range uninhabited aerial vehicles.

Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their experiences of anxiety and loss. With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, many of us are likely to remain reliant upon DMH for the foreseeable future. As such, (...) it is important to articulate some of the specific ways in which the pandemic is affecting our self and world-relation, such that we can identify how DMH services are best able to accommodate some of the newly emerging needs of their users. In this paper I will identify a specific type of loss brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and present it as an important concept for DMH. I refer to this loss as loss of perceptual world-familiarity. Loss of perceptual world-familiarity entails a breakdown in the ongoing effortless responsiveness to our perceptual environment that characterizes much of our everyday lives. To cash this out I will turn to insights from the phenomenological tradition. Initially, my project is descriptive. I aim to bring out how loss of perceptual world-familiarity is a distinctive form of loss that is deeply pervasive yet easily overlooked-hence the relevance of explicating it for DMH purposes. But I will also venture into the space of the normative, offering some reasons for seeing perceptual world-familiarity as a component of well-being. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how loss of perceptual world-familiarity affects the therapeutic setting now that most if not all therapeutic interactions have transitioned to online spaces and I explore the potential to augment these spaces with social interaction technologies. Throughout, my discussion aims to do justice to the reality that perceptual world-familiarity is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, that factors like disability, gender and race affect its robustness, and that this ought to be reckoned with when seeking to incorporate the phenomenon into or mitigate it through DMH services. (shrink)