Results for 'Sober Elliott'

177 found
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  1.  44
    Causal Factors, Causal Inference, Causal Explanation.Elliott Sober & David Papineau - 1986 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 60 (1):97 - 136.
    There are two concepts of causes, property causation and token causation. The principle I want to discuss describes an epistemological connection between the two concepts, which I call the Connecting Principle. The rough idea is that if a token event of type Cis followed by a token event of type E, then the support of the hypothesis that the first event token caused the second increases as the strength of the property causal relation of C to E does. I demonstrate (...)
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  2. Fodor’s B ubbe Meise Against Darwinism.Elliott Sober - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (1):42-49.
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  3. (1 other version)Instrumentalism Revisited.Elliott Sober - 1999 - Critica 31 (91):3-39.
    The logical empiricists said some good things about epistemology and scientific method. However, they associated those epistemological ideas with some rather less good ideas about philosophy of language. There is something epistemologically suspect about statements that cannot be tested. But to say that those statements are meaningless is to go too far. And there is something impossible about trying to figure out which of two empirically equivalent theories is true. But to say that those theories are synonymous is also to (...)
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  4. What is wrong with intelligent design?Elliott Sober - 2007 - Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (1):3-8.
    This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.
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  5. Fitness and the Twins.Elliott Sober - 2020 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 12 (1):1-13.
    Michael Scriven’s (1959) example of identical twins (who are said to be equal in fitness but unequal in their reproductive success) has been used by many philosophers of biology to discuss how fitness should be defined, how selection should be distinguished from drift, and how the environment in which a selection process occurs should be conceptualized. Here it is argued that evolutionary theory has no commitment, one way or the other, as to whether the twins are equally fit. This is (...)
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  6. Parsimony and models of animal minds.Elliott Sober - 2009 - In Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 237.
    The chapter discusses the principle of conservatism and traces how the general principle is related to the specific one. This tracing suggests that the principle of conservatism needs to be refined. Connecting the principle in cognitive science to more general questions about scientific inference also allows us to revisit the question of realism versus instrumentalism. The framework deployed in model selection theory is very general; it is not specific to the subject matter of science. The chapter outlines some non-Bayesian ideas (...)
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  7. A Plea for Pseudo‐Processes†.Elliott Sober - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (3-4):303-309.
    Is all explanations causal explanation? Puzzles about barometer readings "explain" storms and shadow lengths "explaining" flagpole heights make it attractive to think so. Wesley Salmon (1984) has endorsed this causal thesis. One way to test this thesis is to assess the explanatory import of pseudo-processes. I do so by discussing the concept of heritability, which measures a pseudo-process, and one role it played in the theory of natural selection: explaining response to selection. This will show, not just that heritability has (...)
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  8. Natural selection, causality, and laws: What Fodor and piatelli-palmarini got wrong.Elliott Sober - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (4):594-607.
    In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot be an evolutionary (...)
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  9. Holism, Individualism, and the Units of Selection.Elliott Sober - 1980 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980:93 - 121.
    Developing a definition of group selection, and applying that definition to the dispute in the social sciences between methodological holists and methodological individualists, are the two goals of this paper. The definition proposed distinguishes between changes in groups that are due to group selection and changes in groups that are artefacts of selection processes occurring at lower levels of organization. It also explains why the existence of group selection is not implied by the mere fact that fitness values of organisms (...)
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  10. Conjunctive forks and temporally asymmetric inference.Elliott Sober & Martin Barrett - 1992 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1):1 – 23.
    We argue against some of Reichenbach's claims about causal forks are incorrect. We do not see why the Second Law of Thermodynamics rules out the existence of conjunctive forks open to the past. In addition, we argue that a common effect rarely forms a conjunctive fork with its joint causes, but it sometimes does. Nevertheless, we think there is something to be said for Reichenbach's idea that forks of various kinds are relevant to explaining why we know more about the (...)
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  11. Explanatoriness and Evidence: A Reply to McCain and Poston.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2014 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (3):193-199.
    We argue elsewhere that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant . Let H be some hypothesis, O some observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then O screens-off E from H: Pr = Pr. This thesis, hereafter “SOT” , is defended by appeal to a representative case. The case concerns smoking and lung cancer. McCain and Poston grant that SOT holds in cases, like our case concerning smoking and lung cancer, that involve frequency (...)
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  12. The contest between parsimony and likelihood.Elliott Sober - 2004 - Systematic Biology 53 (4):644-653.
    Maximum Parsimony (MP) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) are two methods for evaluating which phlogenetic tree is best supported by data on the characteristics of leaf objects (which may be species, populations, or individual organisms). MP has been criticized for assuming that evolution proceeds parsimoniously -- that if a lineage begins in state i and ends in state j, the way it got from i to j is by the smallest number of changes. MP has been criticized for needing to assume (...)
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  13.  60
    Disjunction and distality: the hard problem for purely probabilistic causal theories of mental content.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2019 - Synthese 198 (8):7197-7230.
    The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the distality problem, but (...)
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  14. Causal, A Priori True, and Explanatory: A Reply to Lange and Rosenberg.Mehmet Elgin & Elliott Sober - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):167-171.
    Sober [2011] argues that some causal statements are a priori true and that a priori causal truths are central to explanations in the theory of natural selection. Lange and Rosenberg [2011] criticize Sober's argument. They concede that there are a priori causal truths, but maintain that those truths are only ‘minimally causal’. They also argue that explanations that are built around a priori causal truths are not causal explanations, properly speaking. Here we criticize both of Lange and Rosenberg's (...)
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  15. It Had to Happen (a review of Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution in a Lonely Universe).Elliott Sober - 2003 - The New York Times:18.
    Conway Morris argues against Stephen Jay Gould's argument that the history of life is radically contingent by describing the abundance of convergences, wherein different lineages starting in different states, arrive at the same adaptations. A standard example is the evolution of the camera eye. This review assesses the validity of Conway Morris' argument.
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  16. Philosophy in Science: Some Personal Reflections.Elliott Sober - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):899-907.
    The task of Philosophy in Science (PinS) is to use philosophical tools to help solve scientific problems. This article describes how I stumbled into this line of work and then addressed several topics in philosophy of biology—units of selection, cladistic parsimony, robustness and trade-offs in model building, adaptationism, and evidence for common ancestry—often in collaboration with scientists. I conclude by offering advice for would-be PinS practitioners.
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  17. Darwin y la selección de grupo.Elliott Sober - 2009 - Ludus Vitalis 17 (32):101-143.
    Do traits evolve because they are good for the group, or do they evolve because they are good for the individual organisms that have them? The question is whether groups, rather than individual organisms, are ever “units of selection.” My exposition begins with the 1960’s, when the idea that traits evolve because they are good for the group was criticized, not just for being factually mistaken, but for embodying a kind of confused thinking that is fundamentally at odds with the (...)
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  18. Evolución, pensamiento poblacionaly esencialismo.Elliott Sober - 2004 - Ludus Vitalis 12 (21):115-148.
    Los filósofos han tendido a discutir el esencialismo como si fuera una doctrina global, una filosofía que, por alguna razón uniforme, debiera ser adoptada por todas las ciencias o por ninguna. Popper (1972) ha adoptado una postura global negativa, porque ve al esencialismo como un obstáculo fundamental para la racionalidad científica. También Quine (1953b, 1960), por una combinación de motivos semánticos y epistemológicos, quiere desterrar el esencialismo de la totalidad del discurso científico. Sin embargo, en fechas más recientes, Putnam (1975) (...)
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  19. Contrastive Causal Explanation and the Explanatoriness of Deterministic and Probabilistic Hypotheses Theories.Elliott Sober - forthcoming - European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
    Carl Hempel (1965) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Richard Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive causal (...)
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  20. Is Explanatoriness a Guide to Confirmation? A Reply to Climenhaga.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2017 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (4):581-590.
    We argued that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in the following sense: Let H be a hypothesis, O an observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then our claim is that Pr = Pr. We defended this screening-off thesis by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga argues that SOT is mistaken because it delivers the wrong verdict about a slightly different smoking-and-cancer case. He also considers a variant of SOT, called (...)
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  21. Interpolating Decisions.Jonathan Cohen & Elliott Sober - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):327-339.
    Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and maximin play a role. Here we describe a (...)
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  22. Hypotheses that attribute false beliefs: A two‐part epistemology.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2020 - Mind and Language 36 (5):664-682.
    Is there some general reason to expect organisms that have beliefs to have false beliefs? And after you observe that an organism occasionally occupies a given neural state that you think encodes a perceptual belief, how do you evaluate hypotheses about the semantic content that that state has, where some of those hypotheses attribute beliefs that are sometimes false while others attribute beliefs that are always true? To address the first of these questions, we discuss evolution by natural selection and (...)
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  23. Inference to the Best Explanation and the Screening-Off Challenge.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38:121-142.
    We argue in Roche and Sober (2013) that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in that Pr(H | O&EXPL) = Pr(H | O), where H is a hypothesis, O is an observation, and EXPL is the proposition that if H and O were true, then H would explain O. This is a “screening-off” thesis. Here we clarify that thesis, reply to criticisms advanced by Lange (2017), consider alternative formulations of Inference to the Best Explanation, discuss a strengthened screening-off thesis, and consider (...)
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  24. Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):129-149.
    All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that many such measures (...)
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  25. Puzzles for ZFEL, McShea and Brandon’s zero force evolutionary law.Martin Barrett, Hayley Clatterbuck, Michael Goldsby, Casey Helgeson, Brian McLoone, Trevor Pearce, Elliott Sober, Reuben Stern & Naftali Weinberger - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (5):723-735.
    In their 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, D. McShea and R. Brandon present a principle that they call ‘‘ZFEL,’’ the zero force evolutionary law. ZFEL says (roughly) that when there are no evolutionary forces acting on a population, the population’s complexity (i.e., how diverse its member organisms are) will increase. Here we develop criticisms of ZFEL and describe a different law of evolution; it says that diversity and complexity do not change when there are no evolutionary causes.
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  26. Marxism and methodological individualism.Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine & Elliott Sober - 2002 - In Derek Matravers & Jonathan E. Pike (eds.), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology. New York: Routledge.
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  27. Explanation = Unification? A New Criticism of Friedman’s Theory and a Reply to an Old One.Roche William & Sober Elliott - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):391-413.
    According to Michael Friedman’s theory of explanation, a law X explains laws Y1, Y2, …, Yn precisely when X unifies the Y’s, where unification is understood in terms of reducing the number of independently acceptable laws. Philip Kitcher criticized Friedman’s theory but did not analyze the concept of independent acceptability. Here we show that Kitcher’s objection can be met by modifying an element in Friedman’s account. In addition, we argue that there are serious objections to the use that Friedman makes (...)
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  28. Sober as a Judge: Elliott Sober: Ockham’s Razors: A user’s manual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 322pp, $29.99 , $99.99.Gordon Belot - 2016 - Metascience 25 (3):387-392.
    In Ockham's Razors: A User's Guide, Elliott Sober argues that parsimony considerations are epistemically relevant on the grounds that certain methods of model selection, such as the Akaike Information Criterion, exhibit good asymptotic behaviour and take the number of adjustable parameters in a model into account. I raise some worries about this form of argument.
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  29. Elliott Sober, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory. Amherst, NY: Prometheus (2011), 230 pp., $21.00. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence, Hope Hollocher, Ryan Nichols, Grant Ramsey, Edwin Siu & Daniel John Sportiello - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (4):705-709.
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  30. Snipping or editing? Parsimony in the chimpanzee mind-reading debate: Elliott Sober: Ockham’s razors: A user’s manual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 322 pp, $ 29.99 PB, $ 99.99 HB.Kristin Andrews - 2016 - Metascience 25 (3):377-386.
    on ). Advice about how to move forward on the mindreading debate, particularly when it comes to overcoming the logical problem, is much needed in comparative psychology. In chapter 4 of his book Ockham’s Razors, Elliott Sober takes on the task by suggesting how we might uncover the mechanism that mediates between the environmental stimuli that is visible to all, and chimpanzee social behavior. I argue that Sober's proposed method for deciding between the behaivor-reading and mindreading hypotheses (...)
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  31. Freedom, determinism, and causality de Elliott Sober.Rodrigo Cid - 2010 - Filosofia Unisinos 11 (3):348-350.
    A primeira tese de Sober é que não podemos agir livremente, a não ser que o Argumento da Causalidade ou o Argumento da Inevitabilidade tenham alguma falha. O Argumento da Causalidade é o seguinte: nossos estados mentais causam movimentos corporais; mas nossos estados mentais são causados por fatores do mundo físico. Nossa personalidade pode ser reconduzida à nossa experiência e à nossa genética. E tanto a experiência quanto a genética foram causados por itens do mundo físico. Assim, o meio (...)
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  32. Defending the piggyback principle against Shapiro and Sober’s empirical approach.Joseph A. Baltimore - 2010 - Synthese 175 (2):151-168.
    Jaegwon Kim’s supervenience/exclusion argument attempts to show that non-reductive physicalism is incompatible with mental causation. This influential argument can be seen as relying on the following principle, which I call “the piggyback principle”: If, with respect to an effect, E, an instance of a supervenient property, A, has no causal powers over and above, or in addition to, those had by its supervenience base, B, then the instance of A does not cause E (unless A is identical with B). In (...)
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  33. Butler's Stone.John J. Tilley - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4): 891–909.
    Early in the eleventh of his Fifteen Sermons, Joseph Butler advances his best-known argument against psychological hedonism. Elliott Sober calls that argument Butler’s stone, and famously objects to it. I consider whether Butler’s stone has philosophical value. In doing so I examine, and reject, two possible ways of overcoming Sober’s objection, each of which has proponents. In examining the first way I discuss Lord Kames’s version of the stone argument, which has hitherto escaped scholarly attention. Finally, I (...)
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  34. ¿Son a priori los modelos explicativos de la selección natural?José Díez & Pablo Lorenzano - 2017 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 8:31--42.
    The epistemic status of Natural Selection has intrigued to biologists and philosophers since the very beginning of the theory to our present times. One prominent contemporary example is Elliott Sober, who claims that Natural Selection, and some other theories in biology, and maybe in economics, are peculiar in including explanatory models/conditionals that are a priori in a sense in which explanatory models/conditionals in Classical Mechanics and most other standard theories are not. In this paper, by analyzing what we (...)
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  35. How Explanation Guides Confirmation.Nevin Climenhaga - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (2):359-68.
    Where E is the proposition that [If H and O were true, H would explain O], William Roche and Elliot Sober have argued that P(H|O&E) = P(H|O). In this paper I argue that not only is this equality not generally true, it is false in the very kinds of cases that Roche and Sober focus on, involving frequency data. In fact, in such cases O raises the probability of H only given that there is an explanatory connection between (...)
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  36. Optimality modeling and explanatory generality.Angela Potochnik - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (5):680-691.
    The optimality approach to modeling natural selection has been criticized by many biologists and philosophers of biology. For instance, Lewontin (1979) argues that the optimality approach is a shortcut that will be replaced by models incorporating genetic information, if and when such models become available. In contrast, I think that optimality models have a permanent role in evolutionary study. I base my argument for this claim on what I think it takes to best explain an event. In certain contexts, optimality (...)
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  37. The Negative View of Natural Selection.Jonathan Birch - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2):569-573.
    An influential argument due to Elliott Sober, subsequently strengthened by Denis Walsh and Joel Pust, moves from plausible premises to the bold conclusion that natural selection cannot explain the traits of individual organisms. If the argument were sound, the explanatory scope of selection would depend, surprisingly, on metaphysical considerations concerning origin essentialism. I show that the Sober-Walsh-Pust argument rests on a flawed counterfactual criterion for explanatory relevance. I further show that a more defensible criterion for explanatory relevance (...)
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  38. Relational Desires and Empirical Evidence against Psychological Egoism.Joshua May - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):39–58.
    Roughly, psychological egoism is the thesis that all of a person's intentional actions are ultimately self-interested in some sense; psychological altruism is the thesis that some of a person's intentional actions are not ultimately self-interested, since some are ultimately other-regarding in some sense. C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists have argued that experiments provide support for a theory called the "empathy-altruism hypothesis" that entails the falsity of psychological egoism. However, several critics claim that there are egoistic explanations of the (...)
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  39. A structural approach to defining units of selection.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 1989 - Philosophy of Science 56 (3):395-418.
    The conflation of two fundamentally distinct issues has generated serious confusion in the philosophical and biological literature concerning the units of selection. The question of how a unit of selection of defined, theoretically, is rarely distinguished from the question of how to determine the empirical accuracy of claims--either specific or general--concerning which unit(s) is undergoing selection processes. In this paper, I begin by refining a definition of the unit of selection, first presented in the philosophical literature by William Wimsatt, which (...)
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  40. Psychological altruism vs. biological altruism: Narrowing the gap with the Baldwin effect.Mahesh Ananth - 2005 - Acta Biotheoretica 53 (3):217-239.
    This paper defends the position that the supposed gap between biological altruism and psychological altruism is not nearly as wide as some scholars (e.g., Elliott Sober) insist. Crucial to this defense is the use of James Mark Baldwin's concepts of “organic selection”and “social heredity” to assist in revealing that the gap between biological and psychological altruism is more of a small lacuna. Specifically, this paper argues that ontogenetic behavioral adjustments, which are crucial to individual survival and reproduction, are (...)
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  41. Evidential holism.Joe Morrison - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (6):e12417.
    Evidential holism begins with something like the claim that “it is only jointly as a theory that scientific statements imply their observable consequences.” This is the holistic claim that Elliott Sober tells us is an “unexceptional observation”. But variations on this “unexceptional” claim feature as a premise in a series of controversial arguments for radical conclusions, such as that there is no analytic or synthetic distinction that the meaning of a sentence cannot be understood without understanding the whole (...)
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  42. Philosophical reflections on Darwin and evolutionary theory. [REVIEW]Massimo Pigliucci - 2012 - Trends in Ecology and Evolution 27 (5):258.
    Few scientists are conscious of the distinc- tion between the logic of what they write and the rhetoric of how they write it. This is because we are taught to write scientific papers and books from a third-person per- spective, using as impersonal (and, almost inevitably, boring [1]) a style as possible. The first chapter in Elliott Sober’s new book examines the difference between Darwin’s logic and his rhetoric in The Origin, and manages to teach some interesting and (...)
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  43. "L’imbrication de la preuve de Dieu et de la cosmologie chez Tresmontant représente-t-elle une preuve ?".Philippe Gagnon - 2022 - In Claude Tresmontant, métaphysicien de l’inachevé (1925-1997). Actes de la journée d’étude du 2 février 2019. Paris: L'Harmattan. pp. 27-47.
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  44. In Defense of a Causal Requirement on Explanation.Garrett Pendergraft - 2011 - In Phyllis McKay Illari Federica Russo (ed.), Causality in the Sciences. Oxford University Press. pp. 470.
    Causalists about explanation claim that to explain an event is to provide information about the causal history of that event. Some causalists also endorse a proportionality claim, namely that one explanation is better than another insofar as it provides a greater amount of causal information. In this chapter I consider various challenges to these causalist claims. There is a common and influential formulation of the causalist requirement – the ‘Causal Process Requirement’ – that does appear vulnerable to these anti-causalist challenges, (...)
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  45. William Paley.Logan Paul Gage - 2017 - In Copan Paul, Tremper Longman I. I. I., Reese Christopher L. & Strauss Michael G. (eds.), Dictionary of Christianity and Science: The Definitive Reference for the Intersection of Christian Faith and Contemporary Science. Zondervan Academic. pp. 500.
    A brief introduction to the life and work of William Paley, including a discussion of the structure of his famous design argument.
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  46. Towards Shutdownable Agents via Stochastic Choice.Elliott Thornley, Alexander Roman, Christos Ziakas, Leyton Ho & Louis Thomson - 2024 - Global Priorities Institute Working Paper.
    Some worry that advanced artificial agents may resist being shut down. The Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP) is an idea for ensuring that doesn't happen. A key part of the IPP is using a novel 'Discounted REward for Same-Length Trajectories (DREST)' reward function to train agents to (1) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be 'USEFUL'), and (2) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be 'NEUTRAL' about trajectory-lengths). In this paper, we propose evaluation metrics for USEFULNESS and NEUTRALITY. We use a (...)
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  47. Comparativism and the Measurement of Partial Belief.Edward Elliott - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2843-2870.
    According to comparativism, degrees of belief are reducible to a system of purely ordinal comparisons of relative confidence. (For example, being more confident that P than that Q, or being equally confident that P and that Q.) In this paper, I raise several general challenges for comparativism, relating to (i) its capacity to illuminate apparently meaningful claims regarding intervals and ratios of strengths of belief, (ii) its capacity to draw enough intuitively meaningful and theoretically relevant distinctions between doxastic states, and (...)
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  48. The procreation asymmetry, improvable-life avoidance and impairable-life acceptance.Elliott Thornley - 2023 - Analysis 83 (3):517-526.
    Many philosophers are attracted to a complaints-based theory of the procreation asymmetry, according to which creating a person with a bad life is wrong (all else equal) because that person can complain about your act, whereas declining to create a person who would have a good life is not wrong (all else equal) because that person never exists and so cannot complain about your act. In this paper, I present two problems for such theories: the problem of impairable-life acceptance and (...)
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  49. The Shutdown Problem: Incomplete Preferences as a Solution.Elliott Thornley - manuscript
    I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of creating artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I then propose a solution: train agents to have incomplete preferences. Specifically, I propose that we train agents to lack a preference between every pair of different-length trajectories. I suggest a way to train such agents using reinforcement learning: (...)
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  50. Betting against the Zen Monk: on preferences and partial belief.Edward Elliott - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3733-3758.
    According to the preference-centric approach to understanding partial belief, the connection between partial beliefs and preferences is key to understanding what partial beliefs are and how they’re measured. As Ramsey put it, the ‘degree of a belief is a causal property of it, which we can express vaguely as the extent to which we are prepared to act on it’ The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, Routledge, Oxon, pp 156–198, 1931). But this idea is not as popular as (...)
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