The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole have (...) had different parts. In this paper I attempt to offer an account of parthood that is intimate enough but not too intimate: the parts generate the whole, but they are not themselves the whole. (shrink)

This paper argues for the value of the ‘strange’ as a hermeneutical tool to open fresh perspectives on an issue of widespread human concern, specifically how to deal with and relate to the dead. Traditional Chinese folk religion and the animistic ghost culture found within it is introduced and the role of gods, ancestors, and ghosts explained. The view that death is not the end of life but the transition to a new relationship with the living raises questions about our (...) potential obligations to the dead. It also has implications for our thinking about intergenerational justice and the role of our memory of the past in shaping our present and future experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...) virtue? And do epistemic virtues need to be reliable? I will sketch an account on which curiosity is only virtuous when rooted in a non-instrumental appreciation of epistemic goods, before arguing that curiosity can exhibit intellectual virtue irrespective of whether one is reliable in satisfying it. (shrink)

I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...) dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed. (shrink)

The integration of biomedical terminologies is indispensable to the process of information integration. When terminologies are linked merely through the alignment of their leaf terms, however, differences in context and ontological structure are ignored. Making use of the SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we show how three reference domain ontologies can be integrated at a higher level, through what we shall call the OBR framework (for: Ontology of Biomedical Reality). OBR is designed to facilitate inference across the boundaries of domain ontologies (...) in anatomy, physiology and pathology. (shrink)

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large-scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that researchers are unable to (...) study live juries. The indirect sources of evidence used by researchers suffer from various problems, the most important of which is dubious levels of ecological validity. Real jury research—studying live jury deliberation—is controversial. However, as I argue, the objections to it are unconvincing. There is in fact a moral imperative to facilitate real jury research. (shrink)

We examine moving spotlight theories of time: theories according to which there are past and future events and an objective present moment. In Section 1, we briefly discuss the origins of the view. In Section 2, we describe the traditional moving spotlight view, which we understand as an ‘enriched’ B-theory of time, and raise some problems for that view. In the next two sections, we describe versions of the moving spotlight view that we think are better and which solve those (...) problems. In Section 3, we describe a version of the view that combines permanentism – the thesis that all things always exist – with propositional temporalism, the thesis that some propositions are sometimes true and sometimes false. In Section 4, we discuss a version of the view that is like an ‘enriched’ presentism. We conclude with some brief thoughts on issues that remain outstanding. (shrink)

Despite playing an important role in epistemology, philosophy of science, and more recently in moral philosophy and aesthetics, the nature of understanding is still much contested. One attractive framework attempts to reduce understanding to other familiar epistemic states. This paper explores and develops a methodology for testing such reductionist theories before offering a counterexample to a recently defended variant on which understanding reduces to what an agent knows.

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physiological states. However, this assumption, on the part of philosophers or vision scientists, has the effect of simply ruling out certain versions of functionalism. While (...) Nida-Rümelin is quite right to search for empirical tests for claims about the nature of visual states, philosophical issues remain pivotal in determining the correctness of these claims. (shrink)

This paper deals with a collection of concerns that, over a period of time, led the author away from the Routley–Meyer semantics, and towards proof- theoretic approaches to relevant logics, and indeed to the weak relevant logic MC of meaning containment.

2015 Reprint of 1956 Printing. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Cybernetics is here defined as "the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine"-in a word, as the art of steersmanship; and this book will interest all who are interested in cybernetics, communication theory and methods for regulation and control. W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His two (...) books, "Design for a Brain" and "An Introduction to Cybernetics," were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential. Contents include: What is new -- Change -- The Determinate Machine -- The Machine with Input -- Stability -- The Black Box -- Quantity of Variety -- Transmission of Variety -- Incessant Transmission -- Regulation in Biological Systems -- Requisite Variety -- The Error-controlled Regulator -- Regulating the Very Large System -- Amplifying Regulation. (shrink)

I first offer a broad taxonomy of models of divine omnipresence in the Christian tradition, both past and present. I then examine the recent model proposed by Hud Hudson (2009, 2014) and Alexander Pruss (2013)—ubiquitous entension—and flag a worry with their account that stems from predominant analyses of the concept of ‘material object’. I then attempt to show that ubiquitous entension has a rich Latin medieval precedent in the work of Augusine and Anselm. I argue that the model of omnipresence (...) explicated by Augustine and Anselm has the resources to avoid the noted worry by offering an alternative account of the divide between the immaterial and the material. I conclude by considering a few alternative analyses of ‘material object’ that make conceptual room for a contemporary Christian theist to follow suite in thinking that at least some immaterial entities are literally spatially located when relating to the denizens of spacetime. (shrink)

Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 (...) pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means. (shrink)

Plenitude, roughly, the thesis that for any non-empty region of spacetime there is a material object that is exactly located at that region, is often thought to be part and parcel of the standard Lewisian package in the metaphysics of persistence. While the wedding of plentitude and Lewisian four-dimensionalism is a natural one indeed, there are a hand-full of dissenters who argue against the notion that Lewisian four-dimensionalism has exclusive rights to plentitude. These ‘promiscuous’ three-dimensionalists argue that a temporalized version (...) of plenitude is entirely compatible with a three-dimensional ontology of enduring entities. While few would deny the coherence of such a position, and much work has been done by its proponents to appease critics, there has been surprisingly little by way of exploring the various forms such an ontology might take as well as the potential advantages of one plenitudinous three-dimensional ontology over another. Here I develop a novel form of plenitudinous three-dimensionalism, what John Hawthorne (Metaphysical essays, 2006a, b) has called “Neo-Aristotelian Plenitude,” and argue that if one is inclined to endorse an abundant three-dimensional ontology, one is wise to opt for a plenitude of accidental unities. (shrink)

Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.

How can researchers use race, as they do now, to conduct health-care studies when its very definition is in question? The belief that race is a social construct without “biological authenticity” though widely shared across disciplines in social science is not subscribed to by traditional science. Yet with an interdisciplinary approach, the two horns of the social construct/genetics dilemma of race are not mutually exclusive. We can use traditional science to provide a rigorous framework and use a social-science approach so (...) that “invisible” factors are used to adjust the design of studies on an as-needed basis. One approach is to first observe health-care outcomes and then categorize the outcomes, thus removing genetic differences as racial proxies from the design of the study. From the outcomes, we can then determine if there is a pattern of conceivable racial categories. If needed, we can apply dynamic notions of race to acknowledge bias without prejudice. We can use them constructively to improve outcomes and reduce racial disparities. Another approach is nearly identical but considers race not at all: While analyzing outcomes, we can determine if there are biological differences significant enough to identify classifications of humans. That is, we look for genetic patterns in the outcomes and classify only those patterns. There is no attempt to link those patterns to race. (shrink)

In Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment”, the idea of the reactive attitudes is used to provide a corrective for an over-intellectualised picture of moral responsibility and of the moral life generally. But Strawson also tells us that in reasoning with someone our attitude towards them must be reactive. Taking up that thought, I argue that Strawson has also provided us with a corrective for an over-intellectualised picture of rationality. Drawing on a Wittgensteinian conception of the relation between thought and its expression, (...) I argue that rationality presupposes participation in a form of engagement with others that is reactive in Strawson’s sense. I also throw fresh light on what Strawson understands by a reactive attitude. (shrink)

In this entry, we outline the ways in which evolutionary theory has implications for the objectivity of morality.

In this paper we examine to what extent the lengths of the links in an animated articulated figure can be changed without the viewer being aware of the change. This is investigated in terms of a framework that emphasizes the role of attention in visual perception. We conducted a set of five experiments to establish bounds for the sen-sitivity to changes in length as a function of several parameters and the amount of attention available. We found that while length changes (...) of 3% can be perceived when the relevant links are given full attention, changes of over 20% can go unnoticed when attention is not focused in this way. These results provide general guidelines for algorithms that produce or process character motion data and also bring to light some of the potential gains that stand to be achieved with attention-based algorithms. (shrink)

One influential approach seeks to capture the idea of society by characterising social action, or interaction, in terms of the particular kinds of awareness it involves. Another approach focuses on social order, seeing it as a form of order that arises spontaneously when rational and mutually aware individuals succeed in solving co-ordination problems. Yet another approach focuses on the role played by communication in achieving collective agreement on the way the world is to be classified and understood, where this is (...) seen as a pre-condition of co-ordination and co-operation. This encyclopedia entry provides a brief account of each approach and offers an assessment of their stengths and limitations. (shrink)

Ex Machina is a 2014 science-fiction film written and directed by Alex Garland, centered around the creation of a human-like artificial intelligence (AI) named Ava. The plot focuses on testing Ava for consciousness by offering a unique reinterpretation of the Turing Test. The film offers an excellent thought experiment demonstrating the consequences of various approaches to a potentially conscious AI. In this paper, I will argue that intelligence testing has significant epistemological shortcomings that necessitate an ethical approach not reliant on (...) ontological commitments. As such, we should be prepared to treat AI as though it is a living being that is deserving of corresponding moral obligations. For a sufficiently human-like AI, such as Ava, I will argue that socio-relational ethics is the best starting point in order to nurture the machine towards ethical proclivities, as evident by the consequences of the characters’ behavior throughout the film. I conclude that intelligence testing is an insufficient determinant of machine ethics, that the project of machine ethics should focus as much on how we treat AI as how AI treats us, and that from a consequentialist perspective it is better to treat machines ethically before they gain consciousness rather than after. (shrink)

Action must be taken to combat climate change. Yet, how the costs of climate action should be allocated among states remains a question. One popular answer—the polluter-pays principle (PPP)—stipulates that those responsible for causing the problem should pay to address it. While intuitively plausible, the PPP has been subjected to withering criticism in recent years. It is timely, following the Paris Agreement, to develop a new version: one that does not focus on historical production-based emissions but rather allocates climate burdens (...) in proportion to each state’s annual consumption-based emissions. This change in carbon accounting results in a fairer and more environmentally effective principle for distributing climate duties. (shrink)

The divine attributes of immensity and omnipresence have been integral to classical Christian confession regarding the nature of the triune God. Divine immensity and omnipresence are affirmed in doctrinal standards such as the Athanasian Creed (c. 500), the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Basel (1431–49), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), and the First Vatican Council (1869–70). In the first section of this chapter, I offer a brief (...) historical overview of divine immensity and divine omnipresence in the Christian tradition. I then offer a brief taxonomy of contemporary models of divine omnipresence in the philosophical and theological landscape. In the second, more constructive section, I aim to gesture toward the retrieval of several classical insights regarding immensity and omnipresence that remain unexplored in contemporary analytic work. (shrink)

Recent work by Stout and colleagues indicates that the neural correlates of language and Early Stone Age toolmaking overlap significantly. The aim of this paper is to add computational detail to their findings. I use an error minimisation model to outline where the information processing overlap between toolmaking and language lies. I argue that the Early Stone Age signals the emergence of complex structured representations. I then highlight a feature of my account: It allows us to understand the early evolution (...) of syntax in terms of an increase in the number and complexity of models in a cognitive system, rather than the development of new types of processing. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to John Rawls’s concern with stability—a concern that, as Rawls himself notes, motivated Part III of A Theory of Justice and some of the more important changes of his political turn. For Rawls, the possibility of achieving ‘stability for the right reasons’ depends on citizens possessing sufficient moral motivation. I argue, however, that the moral psychology Rawls develops to show how such motivation would be cultivated and sustained does not cohere with his specific descriptions of (...) ‘pluralist ’ doctrines. Considering Rawls’s claims that ‘most’ citizens—both in contemporary liberal democracies and in the well-ordered society—possess such doctrines, this incompatibility threatens to undermine his stability arguments. Despite the enormous importance of pluralist doctrines and the potential difficulties they pose for Rawls’s project, remarkably little attention has been paid to them. By critically examining these difficulties, the article begins to address this oversight. (shrink)

Illusionism about phenomenal properties has the potential to leave us with all the benefit of taking consciousness seriously and far fewer problems than those accompanying phenomenal realism. The particular problem I explore here is an epistemological puzzle that leaves the phenomenal realist with a dilemma but causes no trouble for the illusionist: how can we account for false beliefs about our own phenomenal properties? If realism is true, facts about our phenomenal properties must hold independent of our beliefs about those (...) properties, so mistaken phenomenal beliefs must always remain an open possibility. But there is no way to identify the phenomenal facts that make these beliefs false other than by mere stipulation. If illusionism is true, then the state of affairs regarding what a subject's experience seems like is just the illusion itself; there are no further facts of the matter about which the subject might have mistaken beliefs, so the problem does not arise. (shrink)

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. (...) By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together. (shrink)

One notable area in analytic metaphysics that has seen a revival of Aristotelian and scho- lastic inspired metaphysics is the return to a more robust construal of the notion of essence, what some have labelled “real” or “serious” essentialism. However, it is only recently that this more robust notion of essence has been implemented into the debate on truthmaking, mainly by the work of E. J. Lowe. The first part of the paper sets out to explore the scholastic roots of (...) essential dependence as well as an account of truthmaking for accidental predications in terms of accidents. Along the way, the author examines the dialectical role the possibility of separated accidents in the Eucharist play with respect to developing a scholastic account of truthmaking as essential dependence. In conclusion the author utilises Aquinas’s hylomorphic ontology to suggest a new way forward for an essentialist account of truthmaking. (shrink)

This is the editors' Introduction to a special issue of the journal, Multisensory Research. European philosophers of the modern period found multisensory perception to be impossible because they thought that perceptual ideas are defined by how they are experienced. Under this conception, the individual modalities are determinables of ideas—just as colour is a determinable that embraces red and blue, so also the visual is a determinable that embraces colour and (visually experienced) shape. Since no idea is experienced as, for example, (...) both visual and auditory, there can be no such thing as audiovisual perception. This conception of modality is not directly contested, but a variety of perceptual phenomena are listed that could raise interesting questions if treated as multimodal in origin. (shrink)

The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) symbolically represents the structural organization of the human body from the macromolecular to the macroscopic levels, with the goal of providing a robust and consistent scheme for classifying anatomical entities that is designed to serve as a reference ontology in biomedical informatics. Here we articulate the need for formally clarifying the is-a and part-of relations in the FMA and similar ontology and terminology systems. We diagnose certain characteristic errors in the treatment of these relations (...) and show how these errors can be avoided through adoption of the formalism we describe. We then illustrate how a consistently applied formal treatment of taxonomy and partonomy can support the alignment of ontologies. (shrink)

The so-called Final Ranking of the Philebus offers Socrates’ final evaluation of the relative merits of pleasure and reason in the best life. I begin by examining two common lines of interpretation as they address the criterion according to which the final ranking is organized. I then discuss the role ‘similarity’ has in organizing the investigation throughout the dialogue, from the initial comparison of the two lives (of reason and pleasure singly) down through the final ranking. I then consider the (...) thematic discussions of pleasure and reason separately, arguing that their treatments display an intriguing structural similarity. Next, I propose my own reading of the final ranking, whereby the ‘dependence’ relation at work in those two specific discussions may be see as the through-line of all (now five) tiers of the final ranking. I conclude by suggesting that this interpretation is able to preserve what is worthwhile in the two traditional lines of interpretation, while avoiding the pitfalls that tend to accompany them. (shrink)

Several of the most compelling anti-materialist arguments are motivated by the supposed existence of an unbridgeable epistemic gap between first-person subjective knowledge about one’s own conscious experience and third-personally acquired knowledge. The two with which this paper is concerned are Frank Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ and David Chalmers’s ‘modal argument’. The knowledge argument and the modal argument are often taken to function as ‘two sides of the same coin … in principle each succeeds on its own, but in practice they work (...) best in tandem’. This paper disagrees with the above claim, and argues that when considered together the knowledge argument and modal arguments illuminate each other’s weaknesses. These weaknesses become apparent when we acknowledge the epistemic richness of the cognitive aspect of perceptual experience, and question the epistemic role that any non-cognitive aspect might play. Closer examination of judgments about what it’s like to have a perceptual experience reveals fundamental problems with the knowledge argument, and when these problems are exposed, the two arguments can no longer ‘buttress each other where help is needed’. It becomes clear that neither is likely to succeed on its own, and when taken together both are destabilized. (shrink)

Abstract Most discussions of risk are developed in broadly consequentialist terms, focusing on the outcomes of risks as such. This paper will provide an alternative account of risk from a virtue ethical perspective, shifting the focus to the decision to take the risk. Making ethical decisions about risk is, we will argue, not fundamentally about the actual chain of events that the decision sets in process, but about the reasonableness of the decision to take the risk in the first place. (...) A virtue ethical account of risk is needed because the notion of the ‘reasonableness’ of the decision to take the risk is affected by the complexity of the moral status of particular instances of risk-taking and the risk-taker’s responsiveness to these contextual features. The very idea of ‘reasonable risk’ welcomes judgments about the nature of the risk itself, raises questions about complicity, culpability and responsibility, while at its heart, involves a judgement about the justification of risk which unavoidably focuses our attention on the character of the individuals involved in risk making decisions. Keywords: Risk; ethics; morality; responsibility; virtue; choice; reasons . (shrink)

Central to W.E.B. Du Bois’s political theory is a conception of “world” remarkably similar to that put forward, years later, by Martin Heidegger. This point is more methodological than historical: I claim that approaching Du Bois’s work as a source, rather than as a product, of concepts that resonated with subsequent thinkers allows us to better appreciate the novelty and vision of his political theory. Exploring this resonance, I argue, helps to refine the notions of world and founding present in (...) each theorist’s work. Yet, it is only by remaining attentive to their differences that we can understand how Du Bois and Heidegger could endorse such dramatically opposed political programs despite similar theoretical starting points. (shrink)

This chapter aims to explore the intersection of Christian theism, a neo-Aristotelian gloss on metaphysical grounding, and creaturely participation in God. In section one, I aim to de- velop several core tenets at the heart of a theistic participatory ontology as it is found in the Christian tradition, what I call minimal participatory ontology. In section two, I examine the contemporary notion of metaphysical grounding, namely the formal and structure features of the grounding relation, and offer a grounding-theoretic framework for (...) understanding a mini- mal participatory ontology. Finally, in section three, I put forward a neo-Aristotelian account of metaphysical grounding in particular, one that is uniquely suited to capture the central tenets of minimal participatory ontology. (shrink)

In his article “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil,” Kirk R. MacGregor has argued that the Christian theist need not demur at the existence of gratuitous evil. In fact, we are told that Christian theists have ample philosophical, theological, and biblical evidence in favor of the existence of gratuitous evil. In this brief note I examine both the general structure of his argument as well as several of his more central arguments in favor of gratuitous evil and the compatibility (...) of such evil with Christian theism. (shrink)

I offer a concise critique of a recurring line of reasoning advanced by Joseph LaPorte and Samir Okasha that all modern species concepts render the view that biological organisms essentially belong to their species empirically untenable. The argument, I claim, trades on a crucial modal ambiguity that collapses the de re/de dicto distinction. Contra their claim that the continued adherence of such a view on behalf of contemporary metaphysicians stems from the latter’s ignorance of developments in modern biology, the modal (...) ambiguity reveals the need to retrain in modal metaphysics. (shrink)

In an important discussion of the problem of hiddenness, Michael Rea briefly presents and defends an argument from divine hiddenness which he thinks encapsulates the problem of divine hiddenness, and then develops a detailed and nuanced response to this argument. Importantly, Rea claims that his response does not depend on the commonly held theistic view that God allows hiddenness to secure human goods. In this paper I offer a detailed criticism of Rea’s account of what justifies God in allowing divine (...) hiddenness, arguing that Rea’s response to the argument from divine hiddenness is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...) notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence. (shrink)

The free energy principle is notoriously difficult to understand. In this paper, we relate the principle to a framework that philosophers of biology are familiar with: Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. We argue that: systems that minimise free energy are systems with a proper function; and Karl Friston’s notion of implicit modelling can be understood in terms of Millikan’s notion of mapping relations. Our analysis reveals some surprising formal similarities between the two frameworks, and suggests interesting lines of future research. We hope (...) this will aid further philosophical evaluation of the free energy principle. (shrink)

Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue that (...) teleosemantics meets the truth-evaluable criterion and is not required to meet the intensionality criterion. We conclude that Hutto and Myin’s objection fails. (shrink)

This paper will set out in plain language the basic ontology of “Deleuze’s Spinoza”; it will then critically examine whether such a Spinoza has, or indeed could have, ever truly existed. In this, it will be shown that Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza involves the imposition of three interlocking, formal principles. These are (1) Necessitarianism, (2) Immanence, and (3) Univocity. The uncovering of Deleuze’s use of these three principles, how they relate to one another, and what they jointly imply in terms (...) of ontology, will occupy Part 1 of this paper. The critique of these principles from a Spinozist perspective, i.e. that their use by Deleuze is incompatible with Spinoza’s own metaphysics, will occupy Part 2 of this paper. (shrink)

This editorial introduces the Journal of Consciousness Studies special issue on "Animal Consciousness". The 15 contributors and co-editors answer the question "How should we study animal consciousness scientifically?" in 500 words or fewer.

Over the last fifteen years, an ambitious explanatory framework has been proposed to unify explanations across biology and cognitive science. Active inference, whose most famous tenet is the free energy principle, has inspired excitement and confusion in equal measure. Here, we lay the ground for proper critical analysis of active inference, in three ways. First, we give simplified versions of its core mathematical models. Second, we outline the historical development of active inference and its relationship to other theoretical approaches. Third, (...) we describe three different kinds of claim -- labelled mathematical, empirical and general -- routinely made by proponents of the framework, and suggest dialectical links between them. Overall, we aim to increase philosophical understanding of active inference so that it may be more readily evaluated. -/- This the final submitted version of the Introduction to the Topical Collection "The Free Energy Principle: From Biology to Cognition", forthcoming in Biology & Philosophy. (shrink)

Reaction-diffusion systems which have reaction term satisfying f(-q) = -f(q) tend strongly to form striped patterns. Haken’s slaving principle is used to derive differential equations for unstable mode amplitudes close to the Turing instability. This connects a dynamical symmetry to pattern selection, with possible relevance to biological and chemical pattern-forming phenomena.

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)