In this paper I argue for an association between impurity and explanatory power in contemporary mathematics. This proposal is defended against the ancient and influential idea that purity and explanation go hand-in-hand (Aristotle, Bolzano) and recent suggestions that purity/impurity ascriptions and explanatory power are more or less distinct (Section 1). This is done by analyzing a central and deep result of additive number theory, Szemerédi’s theorem, and various of its proofs (Section 2). In particular, I focus upon the radically impure (...) (ergodic) proof due to Furstenberg (Section 3). Furstenberg’s ergodic proof is striking because it utilizes intuitively foreign and infinitary resources to prove a finitary combinatorial result and does so in a perspicuous fashion. I claim that Furstenberg’s proof is explanatory in light of its clear expression of a crucial structural result, which provides the “reason why” Szemerédi’s theorem is true. This is, however, rather surprising: how can such intuitively different conceptual resources “get a grip on” the theorem to be proved? I account for this phenomenon by articulating a new construal of the content of a mathematical statement, which I call structural content (Section 4). I argue that the availability of structural content saves intuitive epistemic distinctions made in mathematical practice and simultaneously explicates the intervention of surprising and explanatorily rich conceptual resources. Structural content also disarms general arguments for thinking that impurity and explanatory power might come apart. Finally, I sketch a proposal that, once structural content is in hand, impure resources lead to explanatory proofs via suitably understood varieties of simplification and unification (Section 5). (shrink)

It is well-known that the global structure of every space-time model for relativistic cosmology is observationally underdetermined. In order to alleviate the severity of this underdetermination, it has been proposed that we adopt the Cosmological Principle because the Principle restricts our attention to a distinguished class of space-time models (spatially homogeneous and isotropic models). I argue that, even assuming the Cosmological Principle, the topology of space remains observationally underdetermined. Nonetheless, I argue that we can muster reasons to prefer various topological (...) properties over others. In particular, I favor the adoption of multiply connected universe models on grounds of (i) simplicity, (ii) Machian considerations, and (iii) explanatory power. We are able to appeal to such grounds because multiply connected topologies open up the possibility of finite universe models (consistent with our best data), which in turn avoid thorny issues concerning the postulation of an actually infinite universe. (shrink)

As robots slip into more domains of human life-from the operating room to the bedroom-they take on our morally important tasks and decisions, as well as create new risks from psychological to physical. This book answers the urgent call to study their ethical, legal, and policy impacts.

These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to John MacFarlane, Mitchell Green, Ryan Wasserman, and Anthony Bigg and Kristie Miller) for a symposium on my book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in *Analytic Philosophy*. [The contribution from MacFarlane is available on his website, those from Wasserman and Green are on their Academia profiles, and the contribution from Bigg and Miller is on Miller's PhilPapers profile.].

The deep influence of affectivity on learning is now widely acknowledged (Keefer et al., 2018; Sánchez-Álvarez et al., 2021). For instance, it has been shown that affect influences key learning-relevant processes, such as motivation, perception, behavior, and critical thinking (Izard, 2002; Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Evidence also shows that emotion and mood strongly influence attention, which in turn drives learning and memory (Elbertson et al., 2010; Elias et al., 1997). Intersubjective phenomena, such as the degree of affection and respect between (...) child and teacher, also affect the child’s learning processes, academic outcomes, and brain development (Kusché & Greenberg, 2006; Ryan & Patrick, 2001). However, the relevant literature is not paying attention to increasing evidence showing that affective phenomena are rooted in interoceptive and homeostatic self- and co-regulatory processes within and between people’s living bodies (Barrett, 2017; Carvalho & Damasio, 2021; Craig, 2015, 2018; Fotopoulou et al., 2022; Fotopoulou & Tsakiris, 2017; Seth & Friston, 2016). In this theoretical chapter, we explore this connection and its importance for learning. We argue that affective experience plays a fundamental role in learning, and that affective experience is rooted in the homeostatic self-/co-regulation of living bodies. Therefore, the homeostatic self-/co-regulation of living bodies plays a fundamental role in learning. In other words, there is an intra- and interpersonal somatic dimension of learning that demands explicit consideration in educational contexts. In this way, we aim to contribute to an understanding of learning and education that moves away from an individualistic, brain-centered information-processing conception toward one centered on sentient, interdependent living bodies. (shrink)

One important task of metaphysics is to answer the question of what it is for an object to exist. The first part of this book offers a systematic reconstruction and critique of contemporary views on existence. The upshot of this part is that the contemporary debate has reached an impasse because none of the considered views is able to formulate a satisfactory answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The second part reconstructs Thomas Aquinas’s view on existence (esse) and argues that (...) it contributes a new perspective which allows us to see why the contemporary debate has reached this impasse. It has come to this point because it has taken a premise for granted which Aquinas’s view rejects, namely, that the existence of an object consists in something’s having a property. A decisive contribution of Aquinas’s theory of esse is that it makes use of the ideas of metaphysical participation and composition. In this way, it can be explained how an object can have esse without being the case that esse is a property of it. This book brings together a reconstruction from the history of philosophy with a systematic study on existence and is therefore relevant for scholars interested in contemporary or medieval theories of existence. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection, and show that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the “adjacent properties” response); and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the “equivocation of motivation required” response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; and also clarify where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral-aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

DNA sequencers, Twitter, MRIs, Facebook, particle accelerators, Google Books, radio telescopes, Tumblr: what do these things have in common? According to the evangelists of “data science,” all of these are instruments for observing reality at unprecedentedly large scales and fine granularities. This perspective ignores the social reality of these very different technological systems, ignoring how they are made, how they work, and what they mean in favor of an exclusive focus on what they generate: Big Data. But no data, big (...) or small, can be interpreted without an understanding of the process that generated them. Statistical data science is applicable to systems that have been designed as scientific instruments, but is likely to lead to confusion when applied to systems that have not. In those cases, a historical inquiry is preferable. (shrink)

In The Conditions for Ethical Chemical Restraint, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) propose ethical standards for the use of chemical restraints, which they consider normatively distinct from physica...

[To readers: Please consider visiting the journal's website to read this work.] In spite of referring to the human tendency to "breath together" or share the same spirit, the word "conspire" has developed a negative connotation in contemporary society, specifically as it pertains to theorizing about conspiracies as a result of the human proclivity to recognize patterns recognition and coalesce common themes amongst those with shared perceptions into something resembling a unified narrative. This proclivity has only become more pronounced with (...) the dawn of the Internet age, and as a result, the tendency to assume the actuality of certain conspiracies and insulate ourselves from viable, competing ideas has led to a series of microenvironments not dissimilar from those that allow for the proliferation of cancerous cells in the human body. In this article, I draw out the analogy between cancer and conspiracy theorizing in order to present readers with a clearer picture of the deleterious effects of the contemporary phenomena such as unbridled political polarization and the effect of sociopolitical news coverage presented by low-correlation outlets, otherwise known as "echo chambers.". (shrink)

In recent work, Robert Brandom has articulated important connections between the deontic normative statuses of entitlement and commitment and the alethic modal statuses of possibility and necessity. In this paper, I articulate an until now unexplored connection between Brandom’s core normative statuses of entitlement and commitment and the agentive modal statuses of ability and compulsion. These modals have application not only in action, but also in perception and inference, and, in both of these cases, there is a direct mapping between (...) the normative statuses that one bears towards various claims, articulated from the perspective of the attributor of commitments and entitlements, and the agentive modal statuses that one bears towards various judgments, articulated from the perspective of the undertaker of commitments. I will highlight this correspondence, focusing on the case of perception, and show how it sheds light on the account of mindedness that emerges from Brandom’s theory of discursive practice. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel problem for representationalism (also known as "intentionalism"), a popular contemporary account of perception. We argue that representationalism is incompatible with supervaluationism, the leading contemporary account of vagueness. The problem generalizes to naive realism and related views, which are also incompatible with supervaluationism.

This paper is a defense of moral evidentialism, the view that we have a moral obligation to form the doxastic attitude that is best supported by our evidence. I will argue that two popular arguments against moral evidentialism are weak. I will also argue that our commitments to the moral evaluation of actions require us to take doxastic obligations seriously.

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how they may be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe the (...) design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between them. (shrink)

According to an argument that I will call the argument from loose lips, we can safely reject certain notorious conspiracy theories because they posit conspiracies that would be nearly impossible to keep secret. I distinguish between three versions of this argument: the epistemic argument, the alethic argument, and the statistical argument. I, then, discuss several limitations of the argument from loose lips. The first limitation is that only the statistical argument can be applied to new conspiracy theories. The second limitation (...) is that no version of the argument suffices to rule out the existence of small initial conspiracies that have no need to add further conspirators. The third limitation is that no version of the argument is dialectically efficacious in the context of arguing with the relevant conspiracy theorists because nothing is said to address the alleged evidence that they cite. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Nietzsche’s claim that suffering is closely related to the realization of certain perfectionist values, such as artistic excellence. According to Bernard Reginster, creative achievement consists in overcoming suffering, and therefore, suffering is an essential ingredient of creative achievement. Because suffering forms an essential part of a valuable whole in this way, Reginster argues that we must in turn value suffering ‘for its own sake’. This paper argues that Reginster’s position is open to the following objection: from (...) the fact that suffering is an essential part of a valuable whole, it does not follow that suffering is itself valuable. Rather, by taking advantage of the principle of organic unities, it would have to form an essential part of a valuable whole in a particular way. The author considers two ways the principle might be attributed to Nietzsche’s views on suffering: first, as an ‘enabling condition’, in which suffering allows for a whole that outweighs its disvalue; and second, as ‘a contributor’, in which suffering positively contributes value to the whole. The paper explores how Nietzsche’s ethics turns out to be crucially informed by this conceptual distinction. (shrink)

Traditional wisdom dictates that statistical model outputs are estimates, not measurements. Despite this, statistical models are employed as measurement instruments in the social sciences. In this article, I scrutinize the use of a specific model—the logit model—for psychological measurement. Given the adoption of a criterion for measurement that I call comparability, I show that the logit model fails to yield measurements due to properties that follow from its fixed residual variance.

Predicates are term-to-sentence devices, and operators are sentence-to-sentence devices. What Kaplan and Montague's Paradox of the Knower demonstrates is that necessity and other modalities cannot be treated as predicates, consistent with arithmetic; they must be treated as operators instead. Such is the current wisdom.A number of previous pieces have challenged such a view by showing that a predicative treatment of modalities neednot raise the Paradox of the Knower. This paper attempts to challenge the current wisdom in another way as well: (...) to show that mere appeal to modal operators in the sense of sentence-to-sentence devices is insufficient toescape the Paradox of the Knower. A family of systems is outlined in which closed formulae can encode other formulae and in which the diagonal lemma and Paradox of the Knower are thereby demonstrable for operators in this sense. (shrink)

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being in question has. We experimentally (...) investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question. (shrink)

An early, very preliminary edition of this book was circulated in 1962 under the title Set-theoretical Structures in Science. There are many reasons for maintaining that such structures play a role in the philosophy of science. Perhaps the best is that they provide the right setting for investigating problems of representation and invariance in any systematic part of science, past or present. Examples are easy to cite. Sophisticated analysis of the nature of representation in perception is to be found already (...) in Plato and Aristotle. One of the great intellectual triumphs of the nineteenth century was the mechanical explanation of such familiar concepts as temperature and pressure by their representation in terms of the motion of particles. A more disturbing change of viewpoint was the realization at the beginning of the twentieth century that the separate invariant properties of space and time must be replaced by the space-time invariants of Einstein's special relativity. Another example, the focus of the longest chapter in this book, is controversy extending over several centuries on the proper representation of probability. The six major positions on this question are critically examined. Topics covered in other chapters include an unusually detailed treatment of theoretical and experimental work on visual space, the two senses of invariance represented by weak and strong reversibility of causal processes, and the representation of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. The final chapter concentrates on different kinds of representations of language, concluding with some empirical results on brain-wave representations of words and sentences. (shrink)

This book launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future. Patrick Todd argues that all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false.

In this article, an account of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system is offered, according to which the contamination system can generate contamination represen- tations in circumstances that do not satisfy the norms of contamination, including in cases of mere visual contact with disgusting objects. It is argued that this architecture is important for explaining the content, logic, distribution, and persistence of maternal impression beliefs – according to which fetal defects are caused by the pregnant mother’s experiences and actions (...) – which in turn provide important evidence of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system. (shrink)

There is a longstanding argument that purports to show that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with human freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of this argument, however, have for some time been met with the following reply: the argument posits what would have to be a mysterious non-causal constraint on freedom. In this paper, I argue that this objection is misguided – not because after all there can indeed be non-causal constraints on freedom (as in Pike, Fischer, and Hunt), but because the (...) success of the incompatibilist's argument does not require the real possibility of non-causal constraints on freedom. I contend that the incompatibilist's argument is best seen as showing that, given divine foreknowledge, something makes one unfree – and that this something is most plausibly identified, not with the foreknowledge itself, but with the causally deterministic factors that would have to be in place in order for there to be infallible foreknowledge in the first place. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: -/- 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the (...) wrongdoing. 4. The target’s wrongdoing must some of “one’s business”. -/- These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing.” Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone’s standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer’s action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non-hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our "moral fragility", the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the "equality of persons". (shrink)

I provide a manipulation-style argument against classical compatibilism—the claim that freedom to do otherwise is consistent with determinism. My question is simple: if Diana really gave Ernie free will, why isn't she worried that he won't use it precisely as she would like? Diana's non-nervousness, I argue, indicates Ernie's non-freedom. Arguably, the intuition that Ernie lacks freedom to do otherwise is stronger than the direct intuition that he is simply not responsible; this result highlights the importance of the denial of (...) the principle of alternative possibilities for compatibilist theories of responsibility. Along the way, I clarify the dialectical role and structure of “manipulation arguments”, and compare the manipulation argument I develop with the more familiar Consequence Argument. I contend that the two arguments are importantly mutually supporting and reinforcing. The result: classical compatibilists should be nervous—and if PAP is true, all compatibilists should be nervous. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a recently articulated, emergentist conception of ethical naturalism and its commitment to causal efficacy, or the idea that moral properties have causal powers, along with its supporting commitment to moral causation. After I reconstruct the theory, I explain how it offers some interesting theoretical benefits to moral realists in virtue of its commitment to causal efficacy. Then, after locating some examples of moral causation in support of this commitment, I present and respond to five objections to (...) such causation, which all threaten to undermine this support. Lastly, I consider a very serious problem that the theory faces in virtue of positing emergent moral properties as responsible for moral causation – namely, the problem of downward moral causation. I describe this problem in detail and argue that, as it stands, it does not spell doom for the theory. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 1, Page 54-62, January 2022.

Some philosophers argue that mental properties are ontologically distinct from physical properties and that, therefore, physicalism ought to be rejected. There are philosophers who feel the force of this challenge but who wish to maintain their physicalism. They suggest that mentality is grounded in inscrutable properties or ‘incrutables’: properties that are not revealed through physical enquiry but that do not violate physicalism. Our analysis reveals that appealing to inscrutables is not a successful strategy for these physicalists, for the following reasons: (...) first, inscrutables likely do violate the conditions of physicalism; second, inscrutables lend greater support to panpsychism than physicalism; third, there is good reason to be agnostic as to whether or not inscrutables count as physical properties. Each of these reasons undermines the physicalist’s purpose in positing inscrutables. If one wishes to remain a physicalist, they ought to direct their philosophical analysis and energies toward revisiting and defeasing the arguments that purport to show that mental properties are ontologically distinct from physical properties. (shrink)

It is widely held that agent-neutral consequentialism is incompatible with deontic constraints. Recently, Kieran Setiya has challenged this orthodoxy by presenting a form of agent-neutral consequentialism that he claims can capture deontic constraints. In this reply, we argue against Setiya's proposal by pointing to features of deontic constraints that his account fails to capture.

It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral properties, where the “naturalists” maintain (...) that moral properties are in some way reducible to the lower-level natural properties on which they supervene, while the “non-naturalists” maintain that moral properties are sui generis and robustly irreducible. In this paper I present a novel version of realist ethical naturalism—a view that I call Emergentist Ethical Naturalism—that reveals this common way of understanding the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism to be flawed by combining a commitment to ethical naturalism with a commitment to the sui generis and robustly irreducible nature of moral properties that typically defines non-naturalism. Then, after presenting the theory and addressing a few worries that one might have about it, I show how it offers some novel, emergence-based responses to the various supervenience challenges that plague moral realism and thereby gives the ethical naturalist a robustly non-reductive option for dealing with these challenges. (shrink)

Whereas the entrance of the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in light of movements in contemporary art and aesthetic theory following in its wake, this essay seeks to understand the motivations for, and the effect of, the monochrome in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1921 in reference to Plato's analysis of pure pleasure and absolute beauty in the Philebus . I argue that Rodchenko and Plato were motivated by a shared project to contend with the aesthetic (...) and psychological effects of figurative semblance, or what Socrates calls the phantasm, in order to harmonize human perception with the world of sensuous material objects. It is in this shared project, I contend, that Rodchenko's strategy is to be understood as a kind of materialist Platonism that, when viewed phenomenologically, reveals Plato's objects of absolute beauty to be, in the context of industrial capitalism and the crisis of perception that Benjamin, among others, saw as its consequence, sites of loss and meaninglessness for modern consciousness, yet sites which nonetheless contain emancipatory potential for a social order that has been systematically alienated from itself and its environment. (shrink)

There is a familiar debate between Russell and Strawson concerning bivalence and ‘the present King of France’. According to the Strawsonian view, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false, whereas, on the Russellian view, that proposition is simply false. In this paper, I develop what I take to be a crucial connection between this debate and a different domain where bivalence has been at stake: future contingents. On the familiar ‘Aristotelian’ view, future contingent propositions are (...) neither true nor false. However, I argue that, just as there is a Russellian alternative to the Strawsonian view concerning ‘the present King of France’, according to which the relevant class of propositions all turn out false, so there is a Russellian alternative to the Aristotelian view, according to which future contingents all turn out false, not neither true nor false. The result: contrary to millennia of philosophical tradition, we can be open futurists without denying bivalence. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s Easy Ontology program is influential and attractive, but faces criticism for being too easy in a way that undercuts its realism by failing to recognize objects which don’t fall under known kinds and generating spurious and duplicative objects by mere conceptual engineering. We suggest that restricting the Easy Ontology program to artifacts avoids these difficulties. We also propose an Easy Ontology-inspired analysis of artifact which cuts through the major extant objections to existing analyses. As Thomasson suggests, our special (...) authorial role with regard to artifacts grants us privileged knowledge of them, which both disarms objections to Easy Ontology and allows a very easy ontology for artifacts. Easy Ontology and artifacts are made for each other. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease 2019 can lead to respiratory failure. Some patients require extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support. During the current pandemic, health care resources in some cities have been overwhelmed, and doctors have faced complex decisions about resource allocation. We present a case in which a pediatric hospital caring for both children and adults seeks to establish guidelines for the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation if there are not enough resources to treat every patient. Experts in critical care, end-of-life care, bioethics, and (...) health policy discuss if age should guide rationing decisions. (shrink)

Let’s say that you regard two things as on a par when you don’t prefer one to other and aren’t indifferent between them. What does rationality require of you when choosing between risky options whose outcomes you regard as on a par? According to Prospectism, you are required to choose the option with the best prospects, where an option’s prospects is a probability-distribution over its potential outcomes. In this paper, I argue that Prospectism violates a dominance principle—which I call The (...) Principle of Predominance—because it sometimes requires you to do something that’s no better than the alternatives and might be worse. I argue that this undermines the strongest argument that’s been given in favor of Prospectism. (shrink)

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be told (...) about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these (...) gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are rather a popular topic these days, and a lot has been written on things like the meaning of _conspiracy theory_, whether it’s ever rational to believe conspiracy theories, and on the psychology and demographics of people who believe conspiracy theories. But very little has been said about why people might be led to posit conspiracy theories in the first place. This paper aims to fill this lacuna. In particular, I shall argue that, in open democratic societies, citizens (...) justifiably presuppose that the epistemic authorities—journalists, academics, scientists, and so on—are engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth. This presupposition generates certain normative expectations on the behaviors of the epistemic authorities—they ought to be open to new evidence, possess a healthy degree of skepticism, be willing to engage with opponents, and so on. So, when an epistemic authority is presented with some putatively anomalous data or an alternative hypothesis for some event or phenomena, people expect the epistemic authority to respond in a way that is consonant with these norms. In some instances, however, the epistemic authorities do not respond in this way and instead are dogmatic, dismissive, and engage in _ad hominem_. From the point of view of the citizen, there’s a tension here between how the epistemic authorities ought to behave and how they have, in fact, behaved which is best resolved either by taking the epistemic authorities less seriously or by positing a conspiracy theory. Put another way, the failure of the epistemic authorities to adhere to the norms by which we take them to be governed when presented with apparent anomalies or alternative hypotheses is one reason for which one might initially posit a conspiracy theory. (shrink)

In this article, I present a novel argument against abortion. In short, what makes it wrong to kill someone is that they are a counterfactual person; counterfactual persons are individuals such that, were they not killed, they would have been persons. My view accommodates two intuitions which many views concerning the wrongness of killing fail to account for: embryo rescue cases and the impermissibility of infanticide. The view avoids embryo rescue cases because embryos in the rescue scenarios are not counterfactual (...) people: they are not counterfactual people because it is false to say that, were they not killed, they would have been persons. As a result, it does not follow from my account that there is a prohibition against allowing embryos to die. On the other hand, infants are counterfactual people: an infant is an individual such that, were she not killed, she would have been a person. (shrink)