Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our (...) environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

I argue that perceptual consciousness is constituted by a mental activity. The mental activity in question is the activity of employing perceptual capacities, such as discriminatory, selective capacities. This is a radical view, but I hope to make it plausible. In arguing for this mental activist view, I reject orthodox views on which perceptual consciousness is analyzed in terms of peculiar entities, such as, phenomenal properties, external mind-independent properties, propositions, sense-data, qualia, or intentional objects.

I argue that any account of imagination should satisfy the following three desiderata. First, imaginations induce actions only in conjunction with beliefs about the environment of the imagining subject. Second, there is a continuum between imaginations and beliefs. Recognizing this continuum is crucial to explain the phenomenon of imaginative immersion. Third, the mental states that relate to imaginations in the way that desires relate to beliefs are a special kind of desire, namely desires to make true in fiction. These desires (...) to make true in fiction do not differ from regular desires in kind, but only in content. I argue for these three desiderata in turn by critically discussing several recent accounts of imagination. (shrink)

We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns (...) of inference that seem manifestly valid, that the purported failures of Comparability would have absurd consequences, and that the influential arguments against Comparability are less compelling than they may have initially seemed. (shrink)

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...) themselves substantive. (shrink)

Knowledge representation (KR) is actually more than representation: It involves also inference, namely inference of “new” knowledge, i.e. new facts. Logic programming is a suitable KR medium, but more often than not discussions on this programming paradigm focus on aspects other than KR. In this paper, I elaborate on the general theory of logic programming and give the essentials of two of its main implementations, to wit, Prolog and Datalog, from the viewpoint of deductive computing over knowledge bases, which includes (...) deductive programming. (shrink)

A. Newell and H. A. Simon were two of the most influential scientists in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the late 1950s through to the early 1990s. This paper reviews their crucial contribution to this field, namely to symbolic AI. This contribution was constituted mostly by their quest for the implementation of general intelligence and (commonsense) knowledge in artificial thinking or reasoning artifacts, a project they shared with many other scientists but that in their case was theoretically (...) based on the idiosyncratic notions of symbol systems and the representational abilities they give rise to, in particular with respect to knowledge. While focusing on the period 1956-1982, this review cites both earlier and later literature and it attempts to make visible their potential relevance to today's greatest unifying AI challenge, to wit, the design of wholly autonomous artificial agents (a.k.a. robots) that are not only rational and ethical, but also self-conscious. (shrink)

My replies to Errol Lord, Adam Pautz, and Peter Railton's commentaries on The Rationality of Perception (2017).

This paper proposes that the question “What should I believe?” is to be answered in the same way as the question “What should I do?,” a view I call Equal Treatment. After clarifying the relevant sense of “should,” I point out advantages that Equal Treatment has over both simple and subtle evidentialist alternatives, including versions that distinguish what one should believe from what one should get oneself to believe. I then discuss views on which there is a distinctively epistemic sense (...) of should. Next I reply to an objection which alleges that non-evidential considerations cannot serve as reasons for which one believes. I then situate Equal Treatment in a broader theoretical framework, discussing connections to rationality, justification, knowledge, and theoretical vs. practical reasoning. Finally, I show how Equal Treatment has important implications for a wide variety of issues, including the status of religious belief, philosophical skepticism, racial profiling and gender stereotyping, and certain issues in psychology, such as depressive realism and positive illusions. (shrink)

Current debates surrounding the virtues and shortcomings of randomization are symptomatic of a lack of appreciation of the fact that causation can be inferred by two distinct inference methods, each requiring its own, specific experimental design. There is a non-statistical type of inference associated with controlled experiments in basic biomedical research; and a statistical variety associated with randomized controlled trials in clinical research. I argue that the main difference between the two hinges on the satisfaction of the comparability requirement, which (...) is in turn dictated by the nature of the objects of study, namely homogeneous or heterogeneous populations of biological systems. Among other things, this entails that the objection according to which randomized experiments fail to provide better evidence for causation because randomization cannot guarantee comparability is mistaken. (shrink)

Some prominent evidentialists argue that practical considerations cannot be normative reasons for belief because they can’t be motivating reasons for belief. Existing pragmatist responses turn out to depend on the assumption that it’s possible to believe in the absence of evidence. The evidentialist may deny this, at which point the debate ends in an impasse. I propose a new strategy for the pragmatist. This involves conceding that belief in the absence of evidence is impossible. We then argue that evidence can (...) play a role in bringing about belief without being a motivating reason for belief, thereby leaving room for practical considerations to serve as motivating reasons. I present two ways in which this can happen. First, agents can use evidence as a mere means by which to believe, with practical considerations serving as motivating reasons for belief, just as we use tools (e.g. a brake pedal) as mere means by which to do something (e.g. slow down) which we are motivated to do for practical reasons. Second, evidence can make it possible for one to choose whether or not to believe – a choice one can then make for practical reasons. These arguments push the debate between the evidentialist and the pragmatist into new territory. It is no longer enough for an evidentialist to insist that belief is impossible without evidence. Even if this is right, the outcome of the debate remains unsettled. It will hang on the ability of the evidentialist to respond to the new pragmatist strategy presented here. (shrink)

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts (...) with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 434-453, March 2022.

In this article, we identify three key design dimensions along which cryptocurrencies differ -- privacy, censorship-resistance, and consensus procedure. Each raises important normative issues. Our discussion uncovers new ways to approach the question of whether Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies should be used as money, and new avenues for developing a positive answer to that question. A guiding theme is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results of disciplines like computer science and (...) economics. Note: this article is the second entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

I argue that inference can tolerate forms of self-ignorance and that these cases of inference undermine canonical models of inference on which inferrers have to appreciate (or purport to appreciate) the support provided by the premises for the conclusion. I propose an alternative model of inference that belongs to a family of rational responses in which the subject cannot pinpoint exactly what she is responding to or why, where this kind of self-ignorance does nothing to undermine the intelligence of the (...) response. (shrink)

Genera, typically hand-in-hand with their branching species, are essential elements of vocabulary-based information constructs, in particular scientific taxonomies. Should they also feature in formal ontologies, the highest of such constructs? I argue in this article that the answer is “Yes” and that the question posed in its title also has a Yes-answer: The way medieval ontologists sliced up the world into genera does matter to formal ontology. More specifically, the way Dietrich of Freiberg, a Latin scholastic, conceived and applied strictly (...) generic criteria to slice up the world into its entities can provide some guidelines to the field of formal ontology with respect to not only its contents, but also its scope. In particular, Dietrich's information criterion plays here a central role. (shrink)

Evidentialists and Pragmatists about reasons for belief have long been in dialectical stalemate. However, recent times have seen a new wave of Evidentialists who claim to provide arguments for their view which should be persuasive even to someone initially inclined toward Pragmatism. This paper reveals a central flaw in this New Evidentialist project: their arguments rely on overly demanding necessary conditions for a consideration to count as a genuine reason. In particular, their conditions rule out the possibility of pragmatic reasons (...) for action. Since the existence of genuine pragmatic reasons for action is common ground between the Evidentialist and the Pragmatist, this problem for the New Evidentialist arguments is fatal. The upshot is that the deadlock between these two positions is restored: neither side can claim to be in possession of an argument that could convince the other. As it happens, I myself favor Pragmatism about reasons for belief, and although I don't claim to be able to convince a committed Evidentialist, I do make a prima facie case for Pragmatism by describing particular scenarios in which it seems to be true. I then go on to develop my own preferred version of the view: Robust Pragmatism, according to which a consideration never constitutes a reason for believing a proposition purely in virtue of being evidence for it. (shrink)

I analyze a type of practice related to inquiry: treating things as zetetically relevant to questions, and argue that this practice is a central normatively evaluable way to extend lines of inquiry. My strategy is to introduce the practice and its normative features by examining its relationship to something already well-understood: the ways that news stories produced by journalists frame events. I then argue that the same core zetetic practice can be found across domains, just not in journalism. Finding the (...) same practice across such different human settings suggests it is a core feature of inquiry. (shrink)

I am deeply indebted to Alex Byrne, Jonathan Cohen and Matthew McGrath for their careful, constructive, and penetrating comments on The Unity of Perception and I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify my view further.

Includes a summary of my book *The Rationality of Perception* (Oxford, 2017) and replies to commentaries on it by Endre Begby, Harmen Ghijsen, and Katia Samoilova. These commentaries and my summary and replies will be published soon in Analysis Reviews. Begby focuses on my analysis of the epistemic features of the interface between individual minds and their cultural milieu (discussed in chapter 10 of *The Rationality of Perception*), Ghijsen focuses on the notion of inference and reliabilism (chapters 5 and 6), (...) and Samoilova focuses on the relationship between epistemic charge (chapter 3) and shifts in the amount of justification needed for knowledge. (shrink)

Can perceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if the perceptual processes from which they're generated, as well as the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet it has long been presumed that perceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long-standing view, I argue that perceptual experiences may well occasionally be states of uncertainty, but that they are never probabilistically structured. I criticize a powerful (...) line of reasoning that we should expect perceptual experience to be probabilistic, given their interfaces with unconscious probabilistic information, with behavior responsive to it, and with credences. (shrink)

We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.

Orthodoxy assumes that the first-person thoughts of an individual are anchored to a stable object. I challenge this assumption by arguing that “I” is polysemous. The perspectival anchor of a first-person thought could be the bearer of the thought, the agent, the bearer of perception, or a body, to name just a few options. These different possible anchors do not form a unity. So, a unified or minimal self cannot, without argument, be posited as the stable anchor of on individual’s (...) first-person thoughts. I show how the polysemy of “I” can be analyzed in terms of polysemous mental files. (shrink)

On how medieval philosophy is not (only) theology.

I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that (...) I argue may help address the puzzle: the public-as-protagonist principle. -/- . (shrink)

Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an answer. On this picture, inquiry is both telic and guided. By contrast, mind-wandering is unguided and atelic, according to the most extensively developed philosophical theory of it. This paper articulates a puzzle that arises from this combination of claims: there seem to be plenty of (...) examples of inquiry progressing within mind-wandering, yet theories of inquiry and mind-wandering can make wandering inquiry seem impossible or incoherent. I offer several solutions to this puzzle and make the case that taken together, they illuminate a prevalent form of inquiry that the burgeoning literature on that topic overlooks: inquiry that progresses spontaneously. (shrink)

Despite their importance in the history of philosophy and in particular in the work of Aristotle and Kant, mental capacities have been neglected in recent philosophical work. By contrast, the notion of a capacity is deeply entrenched in psychology and the brain sciences. Driven by the idea that a cognitive system has the capacity it does in virtue of its internal components and their organization, it is standard to appeal to capacities in cognitive psychology. The main benefit of invoking capacities (...) in an account of the mind is that it allows for an elegant counterfactual analysis of mental states: it allows us to analyze mental states on three distinct yet interrelated levels. A first level of analysis pertains to the function of mental capacities. A second level of analysis pertains to the mental capacities employed, irrespective of the context in which they are employed. A third level of analysis pertains to the mental capacities employed, taking into account the context in which they are employed. This paper develops an account of perceptual capacities. This account involves an analysis of their function, their individuation and possession conditions, the relation between perceptual capacities and their employment, as well as their informational and neural base conditions. (shrink)

A number of Bayesians claim that, if one has no evidence relevant to a proposition P, then one's credence in P should be spread over the interval [0, 1]. Against this, I argue: first, that it is inconsistent with plausible claims about comparative levels of confidence; second, that it precludes inductive learning in certain cases. Two motivations for the view are considered and rejected. A discussion of alternatives leads to the conjecture that there is an in-principle limitation on formal representations (...) of belief: they cannot be both fully accurate and maximally specific. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it's possible that the contents of some visual experiences are influenced by the subject's prior beliefs, hopes, suspicions, desires, fears or other mental states, and that this possibility places constraints on the theory of perceptual justification that 'dogmatism' or 'phenomenal conservativism' cannot respect.

There is more than one way to say that composition is identity. Yi has distinguished the Weak Composition thesis from the Strong Composition thesis and attributed the former to David Lewis while noting that Lewis associates something like the latter with me. Weak Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is closely analogous to identity. Strong Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is identity. Yi is (...) right that Strong Composition does not fully reflect my view. We must recognize further what, borrowing Lewis's characterization, could be called the "stronger, and stranger" Composition thesis, or what I'll call the Stronger Composition thesis for short. On Strong Composition, it is only collectively that the parts are identical with the whole. On Stronger Composition, they are individually identical with it as well. I will explain and motivate this thesis. (shrink)

Many have thought that it is impossible to rationally persuade an external world skeptic that we have knowledge of the external world. This paper aims to show how this could be done. I argue, while appealing only to premises that a skeptic could accept, that it is not rational to believe external world skepticism, because doing so commits one to more extreme forms of skepticism in a way that is self-undermining. In particular, the external world skeptic is ultimately committed to (...) believing a proposition P while believing that she shouldn’t believe P, an irrational combination of beliefs. Suspending judgment on skepticism is also problematic, for similar reasons; and, I argue, rational dilemmas are not possible; so, we should believe that skepticism is false. (shrink)

Entry in Routledge handbook of skill and expertise. Discusses social perception, perceptual expertise, knowing what things look like, and a bit about about aesthetics at the end.

With what modes of mentality can we build a visceral, subjective sense of being in some specific mass-political society? Theorists and political cultivators standardly call upon the imagination – the kind prompted by symbols and rituals, for example. Could perception ever play such a role? I argue that it can, but that perceptions of mass-political publics come with costs of cruelty and illusion that neither democratic theorists nor participants should be willing to pay. The clearest examples of such perceptions are (...) found in fascist political culture. My discussion aims to illuminate what it is about publics, perception, and democracy that makes this so. -/- . (shrink)

Effective Field Theory (EFT) is the successful paradigm underlying modern theoretical physics, including the "Core Theory" of the Standard Model of particle physics plus Einstein's general relativity. I will argue that EFT grants us a unique insight: each EFT model comes with a built-in specification of its domain of applicability. Hence, once a model is tested within some domain (of energies and interaction strengths), we can be confident that it will continue to be accurate within that domain. Currently, the Core (...) Theory has been tested in regimes that include all of the energy scales relevant to the physics of everyday life (biology, chemistry, technology, etc.). Therefore, we have reason to be confident that the laws of physics underlying the phenomena of everyday life are completely known. (shrink)

Written for newcomers to philosophy, especally experimental scientists and people in the literary humanities. I focus on the role of fiction and fictional examples in the philosophy of mind, and highlight three roles for invented situations: posing a loaded question (think of Frank Jackson’s Mary), illustrating a philosphical problem, and testing normative and modal hypotheses.

chapter on perception and bias including implicit bias.

Although formal thought disorder (FTD) has been for long a clinical label in the assessment of some psychiatric disorders, in particular of schizophrenia, it remains a source of controversy, mostly because it is hard to say what exactly the “formal” in FTD refers to. We see anomalous processing of terminological knowledge, a core construct of human knowledge in general, behind FTD symptoms and we approach this anomaly from a strictly formal perspective. More specifically, we present here a symbolic computational model (...) of storage in, and activation of, a human semantic network, or semantic memory, whose core element is logical form; this is normalized by description logic (DL), namely by CL, a DL-based language – Conception Language – designed to formalize conceptualization from the viewpoint of individual cognitive agency. In this model, disruptions in the rule-based implementation of the logical form account for the apparently semantic anomalies symptomatic of FTD, which are detected by means of a CL-based algorithmic assessment. (shrink)

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to (...) accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational. (shrink)

This paper argues for a sufficient evidence condition on knowledge and I argue that there is no belief condition on knowledge.

Formal thought disorder (FTD) is a clinical mental condition that is typically diagnosable by the speech productions of patients. However, this has been a vexing condition for the clinical community, as it is not at all easy to determine what “formal” means in the plethora of symptoms exhibited. We present a logic-based model for the syntax–semantics interface in semantic networking that can not only explain, but also diagnose, FTD. Our model is based on description logic (DL), which is well known (...) for its adequacy to model terminological knowledge. More specifically, we show how faulty logical form as defined in DL-based Conception Language (CL) impacts the semantic content of linguistic productions that are characteristic of FTD. We accordingly call this the dyssyntax model. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of perspectives that explains both perspectival stability and flexibility informed by research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Any individual has limited processing resources, and so selects and represents only information pertinent to the situation or task at hand, filtering out information that can safely be ignored. An individual’s active perspective is anchored, for example, by her self-concept currently in force. This perspectival anchor can shift from moment to moment as she navigates her (...) environment, thus yielding a change in her active perspective. However, the extent to which an individual’s active perspective can shift is restricted by her overall cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and agential schemas that constitute what we call her dormant perspective. Thus, while an individual’s dormant perspective changes only slowly over time, her active perspective can change abruptly. (shrink)

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the (...) second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation. (shrink)