Kein Hahn kräht mehr nach dem Verifikationsprinzip, das Moritz Schlick zusammen mit seinen Mitstreitern des Wiener Kreises verfochten hat. Seit einem halben Jahrhundert gilt das Prinzip als philosophisch erledigt; doch Totgesagte leben länger. Ich versuche, eine Fassung des Prinzips zu formulieren, die auch unter den Bedingungen der Nachkriegs-Philosophie verteidigt werden kann: Grob gesagt, muss jeder sinnvolle Satz im Prinzip empirisch (oder doch aposteriori) überprüft werden können, einerlei ob verifiziert oder falsifiziert, ob fallibel oder infallibel, ob direkt oder indirekt, ob (...) deduktiv, abduktiv oder induktiv, ob durch Sinneswahrnehmung oder durch Selbstwahrnehmung. Je nach Situation verlangt das Prinzip die unterschiedlichsten Formulierungen; es wäre verfehlt, es ein für allemal zu fixieren. Vermutlich können wir es sogar auf Sätze ausdehnen, die sich apriori rechtfertigen lassen. Anhand einer Serie von Beispielen (die z.T. aus Schlicks Schriften stammen) demonstriere ich, welche guten Dienste das Prinzip leistet. Erstens dient es dazu, intellektuelle Hochstapelei aus dem Spiel zu werfen und von sinnvollen Aussagen zu unterscheiden. Nun gibt es Sätze, an deren Sinn wir nicht gern rütteln lassen wollen, selbst wenn zunächst nicht klar ist, wie sie sich überprüfen lassen sollen. Das legt einen zweiten Einsatz des Prinzips nahe: Wir sind in diesem Fall aufgerufen, mehr Mühe in den scheinbar unüberprüfbaren Satz zu investieren, ihn besser zu explizieren und dabei doch noch einen Weg zu seiner Überprüfung freizuschaufeln. Bei dieser Übung kann sich sogar unser Überprüfungsbegriff verändern (und damit auch der Gehalt des Verifikationsprinzips selbst). Insgesamt sollten wir den Überprüfungsbegriff so fassen, dass laut Prinzip nicht zuviele wichtige Sätze sinnlos erscheinen. In einer aufklärerischen Ethik des klaren Redens, Meinens und Fragens kommt es darauf an, die gegenläufigen Denkbewegungen auszutarieren, in die wir beim verifikationalistischen Philosophieren gezogen werden. Was das heißt, führe ich anhand vermeintlich sinnloser Sätze aus der Raum/Zeit-Philosophie vor. Am Ende des Aufsatzes bringe ich einige Beispiele ausgemachten Unsinns. (shrink)

Memetic Science is the name of a new field that deals with the quantitativeanalysis of cultural transfer.The units of cultural transfer are entities called "memes". In a nutshell, memes are to cultural and mental constructs as genesare to biological organisms. Examplesof memesare ideas,tunes, fashions, and virtuallyany culturaland behavioral unit that gets copiedwitha certaindegree of fidelity. It is arguedthat the under standing of memes is of similar importance and consequence as the understanding of processes involving DNA and RNA in molecular biology.Thispaperpresentsa (...) rigorousfoundation fordiscussion ofmemes and approaches to quantifying relevantaspects of memegenesis, inter action, mutation, growth,deathand spreadingprocesses. It is also argued inthispaper that recombinant memetics is possible incomplete analogy to recombinant DNA/ genetic engineering. Special attention is paid to memes in written modern English. (shrink)

Von Zeit zu Zeit hat man Preisaufgaben uber die Frage gestellt, welche Fortschritte die Philosophie in einem bestimmten Zeitraume gemacht habe. Der Zeitabschnitt pflegte auf der einen Seite durch den Namen eines grosen Denkers, auf der andern durch die "Gegenwart"? abgegrenzt zu werden. Man schien also vorauszusetzen, das uber die philosophischen Fortschritte der Menschheit bis zu jenem Denker hin einigermasen Klarheit herrsche, das es aber von da ab zweifelhaft sei, welche neuen Errungenschaften die letzte Zeit hinzugefugt habe.

Ichbin überzeugt, daß die Hauptwiderstände gegen unsere Auffassung daher rühren, daß der Unterschied zwischen der Falschheit und der Sinn|losigkeit eines Satzes nicht beachtet wird. Der Satz: ”Das Reden von einer metaphysischen Außenwelt ist sinnleer“ sagt nicht: ”Es gibt keine metaphysische Außenwelt“, sondern etwas toto coelo anderes. Der Empirist sagt dem Metaphysiker nicht: ”Deine Worte behaupten etwas Falsches“, sondern ”Deine Worte behaupten überhaupt nichts!“ Er widerspricht ihm nicht, sondern er sagt: ”Ich verstehe dich nicht“.

Problems in normative ethics paradigmatically concern what it is obligatory or permissible for an individual to do. Yet sometimes, each of us ought to do something individually in virtue of what we ought to do together. Unfortunately, traversing these two different levels at which a moral obligation can arise – individual and collective – is fraught with difficulties that easily lure us into conclusions muddying our understanding of collective obligations. This paper seeks to clearly lay out a systematic problem central (...) to the relation between collective and individual duties in view of alleviating some such confusion and facilitating more concerted attempts at resolving it: Collective duties require individuals to act in order for the collective duty to be fulfilled. Yet typically, a collective duty does not entail any one set of individual duties that would prescribe such contributory actions: The work we need to do in order to fulfil a duty can be allocated differently to the individuals collectively bearing it. Much like in matters of distributive justice, then, deriving individual duties from a collective one requires us to employ a distributive scheme, which raises separate normative concerns that have rarely taken centre stage in the debate so far. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of Hume’s views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American Crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended to (...) the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This article provides a re-evaluation of David Hume's intensive reading of the classics at an important moment of his literary and intellectual career. It sets out to reconstruct the extent and depth of this reading as well as the uses – scholarly, philosophical and polemical – to which Hume put the information he had gathered in the course of it. The article contends that Hume read the classics against the grain to collect data on a wide range of cultural information (...) which he could utilise for a number of literary and philosophical projects he was engaged in during the early 1750s. This reading soon came to pervade almost all aspects of Hume's literary activities of that period and resulted in what is here described as a fragmentary history of classical antiquity. As a result Hume's reading of the classics emerges from this article as both more extensive and more significant than has so far been acknowledged. (shrink)

The paper continues my earlier Chat with OpenAI’s ChatGPT with a Focused LLM Experiment (FLEX). The idea is to conduct Large Language Model (LLM) based explorations of certain areas or concepts. The approach is based on crafting initial guiding prompts and then follow up with user prompts based on the LLMs’ responses. The goals include improving understanding of LLM capabilities and their limitations culminating in optimized prompts. The specific subjects explored as research subject matter include a) diagonalization techniques as practiced (...) by Cantor, Turing, Gödel, and the advances, such as the Forcing techniques introduced by Paul Cohen and later investigators, b) Knowledge Hierarchies & Mapping Exercises, c) Discussions of IJ Good’s Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, AGI, and Super- intelligence. Results suggest variability between major models like ChatGPT-4, Llama-3, Cohere, Sonnet and Opus. Results also point to strong dependence on users’ preexisting knowledge and skill bases. The paper should be viewed as ’raw data’ rather than a polished authoritative reference. (shrink)

What is Understanding? This is the first of a series of Chats with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Chat). The main goal is to obtain Chat’s response to a series of questions about the concept of ’understand- ing’. The approach is a conversational approach where the author (labeled as user) asks (prompts) Chat, obtains a response, and then uses the response to formulate followup questions. David Deutsch’s assertion of the primality of the process / capability of understanding is used as the starting point. (...) Understanding is posited as a major step in the Big Picture description of emergence in the Universe. Understanding follows the emergence of Brains and Minds, culminating in Power Over the Universe. My evaluation suggests that Chat does indeed offer utility, but also has limitations manifested by overly general responses that do not focus tightly on the questions asked. Chat does yield some gems that could be easily missed. The approach used here includes creating Metaprompts, wherein Chat is asked to create more efficient prompts based on initial promptsThis approach appears to hold significant promise, and will likely be of benefit to those exploring various facets of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs) and designers of Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). Other findings include the need for creating new metrics and ways of discussing intelligence, and various adjacent areas and subprocesses associated with intelligence. Discussions of future directions is also included. (shrink)

We argue that the need for commentary in commonly used linear calculi of natural deduction is connected to the “deletion” of illocutionary expressions that express the role of propositions as reasons, assumptions, or inferred propositions. We first analyze the formalization of an informal proof in some common calculi which do not formalize natural language illocutionary expressions, and show that in these calculi the formalizations of the example proof rely on commentary devices that have no counterpart in the original proof. We (...) then present a linear natural deduction calculus that makes use of formal illocutionary expressions in such a way that unique readability for derivations is guaranteed – thus showing that formalizing illocutionary expressions can eliminate the need for commentary. (shrink)

Climate change, pollution, and deforestation have a negative impact on global mental health. There is an environmental justice dimension to this challenge as wealthy people and high-income countries are major contributors to climate change and pollution, while poor people and low-income countries are heavily affected by the consequences. Using state-of-the art data mining, we analyzed and visualized the global research landscape on mental health, climate change, pollution and deforestation over a 15-year period. Metadata of papers were exported from PubMed®, and (...) both relevance and relatedness of terms in different time frames were computed using VOSviewer. Co-occurrence graphs were used to visualize results. The development of exemplary terms over time was plotted separately. The number of research papers on mental health and environmental challenges is growing in a linear fashion. Major topics are climate change, chemical pollution, including psychiatric medication in wastewater, and neurobiological effects. Research on specific psychiatric syndromes and diseases, particularly on their ethical and social aspects is less prominent. There is a growing body of research literature on links between mental health, climate change, pollution, and deforestation. This research provides a graphic overview to mental healthcare professionals and political stakeholders. Social and ethical aspects of the climate change-mental health link have been neglected, and more research is needed. (shrink)

The traditional use of the expression 'pseudoproblem' is analysed in order to clarify the talk of pseudoproblems and related phenomena. The goal is to produce a philosophically serviceable terminology that stays true to its historical roots. This explicative study is inspired by and makes use of the method of logical reconstruction. Since pseudoproblems are usually expressed by pseudoquestions a formal language of questions is presented as a possible reconstruction language for alleged pseudoproblems. The study yields an informal theory of pseudoproblems (...) whose presuppositions are critically investigated right away. At least one result remains: Claims of pseudoproblemship and their refutations must not be voiced casually - they are to be relativized and need substantial interpretive effort. (shrink)

Building on the work of Peter Hinst and Geo Siegwart, we develop a pragmatised natural deduction calculus, i.e. a natural deduction calculus that incorporates illocutionary operators at the formal level, and prove its adequacy. In contrast to other linear calculi of natural deduction, derivations in this calculus are sequences of object-language sentences which do not require graphical or other means of commentary in order to keep track of assumptions or to indicate subproofs. (Translation of our German paper "Ein Redehandlungskalkül. Ein (...) pragmatisierter Kalkül des natürlichen Schließens nebst Metatheorie"; online available at http://philpapers.org/rec/CORERE.). (shrink)

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...) respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

A prominent version of emotional cognitivism is the view that emotions are preceded by awareness of value. In a recent paper, Jonathan Mitchell (2019) has attacked this view (which he calls the content-priority view). According to him, extant suggestions for the relevant type of pre-emotional evaluative awareness are all problematic. Unless these problems can be overcome, he argues, the view does not represent a plausible competitor to rivaling cognitivist views. As Mitchell supposes, the view is not mandatory since its core (...) motivations can be accommodated by competing views, too. I argue that Mitchell's case against the content-priority view is unconvincing as it misconceives the principal motivation for the view. As I show, properly reconstructed, this motivation provides a strong case for the indispensability of the view to any adequate cognitivist treatment of emotion. Moreover, Mitchell's survey of candidates for pre-emotional value awareness can be seen to rest on problematic phenomenological assumptions. (shrink)

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary (...) access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable as evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, (...) I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation. (shrink)

There is a wide range of things we do out of emotion. For example, we smile with pleasure, our voices drop when we are sad, we recoil in shock or jump for joy, we apologize to others out of remorse. It is uncontroversial that some of these behaviors are actions. Clearly, apologizing is an action if anything is. Things seem less clear in the case of other emotional behaviors. Intuitively, the drop in a sad person’s voice is something that happens (...) to her, rather than something she actively performs. Perhaps more interestingly, even jumping for joy can seem a problematic case: although its execution involves the active performance of certain movements, it has been argued to contrast, e.g., with an act of apology, in that it is not performed in order to achieve some end, such as repairing a relationship. This can make this behavior seem considerably different from paradigm actions. Our central concern in this paper is with which emotional behaviors should be classed as actions and why... (shrink)

Often philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians employ a notion of intended structure when talking about a branch of mathematics. In addition, we know that there are foundational mathematical theories that can find representatives for the objects of informal mathematics. In this paper, we examine how faithfully foundational theories can represent intended structures, and show that this question is closely linked to the decidability of the theory of the intended structure. We argue that this sheds light on the trade-off between expressive power (...) and meta-theoretic properties when comparing first-order and second-order logic. (shrink)

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there (...) still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)

This paper explores a currently popular view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which emotions constitute a specific form of evaluative aspect-perception (cf. esp. Roberts 2003, Döring 2004, Slaby 2008). On this view, adequate or fitting emotions play an important epistemic roe vis à vis evaluative knowledge. The paper specifically asks how to conceive of the adequacy or fittingness conditions of emotion. Considering the specific, relational nature of the evaluative properties disclosed by emotions, it is argued that a suitable (...) standard of fittingness has both a world-involving and person-involving aspect: Fitting emotions require both a fundamentum in re as well as a fundamentum in persona. (shrink)

Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe in der Handlungs- und Erkenntnistheorie. Folgende drei Fragen werden schwerpunktmäßig behandelt: a) Was für eine Art von Entität sind motivierende Gründe? b) Welche Beziehung besteht zwischen einer Handlung oder Einstellung und ihren motivierenden Gründen? c) Welche kognitiven Bedingungen gelten für die Zuschreibung motivierender Gründe?

This essay is about the relationship between the notions of practical reason, the will, and choice in Kant’s practical philosophy. Although Kant explicitly identifies practical reason and the will, many interpreters argue that he cannot really mean it on the grounds that unless they are distinct, irrational and, especially, immoral action is impossible. Other readers affirm his identification but distinguish the will from choice on the same basis. We argue that proper attention to Kant’s conception of practical reason as a (...) capacity reveals that these distinctions are neither textually grounded nor philosophically necessary. His moral psychology concerns a single capacity, practical reason, which is the will, and whose actualities in this or that individual fall under the title of choice. Practical reason is the will and choice because it is the rational faculty of desire: a rational being’s capacity to be, by means of her representations, the cause of the actuality of their objects. This, we argue, is entailed by his conception of rational action: action not just in accordance with, but in and through the representation of, principles. The possibility of irrational action is explained not by a distinction between capacities but by the finitude, and thereby the fallibility, of human reason. (shrink)

In the debates of value-theory, it is often assumed that the problem of relativism is to be addressed in a general way, taking moral values as archetype of values. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a differentiation of this debate by facing the problem of relativism in terms of a specific kind of values, namely that of cultural values ascribed to heritage. It shall be shown that by involving both cultural and value-dimensions, the case of cultural heritage (...) does require an approach more open to historical change and cultural differences. After elaborating the various aspects of cultural heritage, some features of cultural values and their experience are to be described. Discussing the problems of radical absolutist and relativist approaches, I will defend a ‘middle way’ that is able to articulate the historicity and cultural diversity of our reception of heritage and its values without giving up the idea of an irreducibility of value-phenomena: Such a view has to recognise the culturally produced character of objects of heritage, the culturally mediated nature of our experience of its values and finally the specific feature of cultural values, whose realisation is interwoven with cultural acts of recognition and collective identification. (shrink)

In recent years, the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has profoundly reshaped the way we access and utilize humanity's vast reservoir of knowledge. Equipped with this powerful tool, I have undertaken a thorough exploration of the Human Mind, motivated by a growing concern: the evident decline in students' enthusiasm for learning. More specifically, as a professor and researcher, my need for understanding has driven me to explore in depth what defines us as Human beings and what sets us apart from (...) other species. This investigative journey prompted me to reevaluate the evolutionary process, revisit Darwin's theories, and contemplate fundamental questions regarding the nature of time and reality. These reflections ultimately culminated in the formulation of a concept we call the ``Total Universe", a realm in which all possible events and interactions coexist. Building on this concept, we formulated a Theory of Consciousness rooted in the exploration of this Universe through our minds. This culminated in the emergence of the ``World of the Mind", which represents Human reality within the Total Universe, the fusion of all existing Human realities. Importantly, this theory not only integrates various theories of consciousness but also provides a clear framework for understanding what it might mean for Artificial Intelligence to attain consciousness. Hence, I invite you to embark on this journey of reflection, guided by this collection of written codes that encapsulate the discoveries made within the Total Universe through my mind, my reality. My perspective may resonate with yours, or it may not, and both are entirely valid. After all, each individual inhabits their own unique reality. (shrink)

Why should we decolonise knowledge? One popular rationale is that colonialism has set up a single perspective as epistemically authoritative over many equally legitimate ones, and this is a form of...

Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be good. Given this, we should conclude (...) that beauty is not generally necessary or sufficient for epistemic value, and increasing beauty will not generally tend to increase epistemic value. (shrink)

One of the main contentions of the framework for Responsible Innovation (RI) is that social and ethical aspects have to be addressed by deliberative engagement with stakeholders and the wider public throughout the innovation process. The aim of this article is to reflect on the question to what extent is deliberative engagement suitable for conducting RI in business. We discuss several tensions that arise when this framework is applied in the business context. Further, we analyse the place of deliberative engagement (...) in several theories of business ethics. We conclude that there remains a tension between the ideal of RI and the way in which the competitive market operates. Hence, RI scholars should reflect more critically on changes that are required in the market in order to make RI possible, modify the ideal of deliberative engagement for RI in business, or attempt to strike a balance between these two responses. (shrink)

Sensation should be understood globally: some infant behaviors do not make sense on the model of separate senses; neonates of all species lack time to learn about the world by triangulating among different senses. Considerations of natural selection favor a global understanding; and the global interpretation is not as opposed to traditional work on sensation as might seem.

A number of philosophers think that grounding is, in some sense, well-founded. This thesis, however, is not always articulated precisely, nor is there a consensus in the literature as to how it should be characterized. In what follows, I consider several principles that one might have in mind when asserting that grounding is well-founded, and I argue that one of these principles, which I call ‘full foundations’, best captures the relevant claim. My argument is by the process of elimination. For (...) each of the inadequate principles, I illustrate its inadequacy by showing either that it excludes cases that should not be ruled out by a well-foundedness axiom for grounding, or that it admits cases that should be ruled out. (shrink)

Many pantheists have claimed that their view of the divine is motivated by a kind of spiritual experience. In this paper, I articulate a novel argument, inspired by recent work on moral exemplarism, that gives voice to this kind of motivation for pantheism. The argument is based on two claims about the emotion of awe, each of which is defended primarily via critical engagement with empirical research on the emotion. I also illustrate how this pathway to pantheism offers pantheists distinctive (...) resources for responding to persistent objections to their view, and how it might lead to more exotic views incorporating pantheistic elements. (shrink)

I provide a characterization of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions---that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of acyclic relations---in terms of hyper-relations satisfying certain properties. For those hyper-relations Nehring calls extended preference relations, the central characterizing condition is weaker than (hyper-relation) transitivity but stronger than (hyper-relation) acyclicity. Furthermore, the relevant type of hyper-relation can be represented as the intersection of a certain class of its extensions. These results generalize known, analogous results for path independent choice functions.

For two ideally rational agents, does learning a finite amount of shared evidence necessitate agreement? No. But does it at least guard against belief polarization, the case in which their opinions get further apart? No. OK, but are rational agents guaranteed to avoid polarization if they have access to an infinite, increasing stream of shared evidence? No.

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

In this work, we attempt to define a notion of compositeness compatible with Quantum Field Theory. Considering the analytic properties of the S-matrix, we conclude that there is no satisfactory definition of compositeness compatible with Quantum Field Theory. Without this notion, one must claim that all bound states are equally fundamental, that is, one cannot rigorously claim that everyday objects are made of atoms or that atoms are made of protons and neutrons. I then show how an approximate notion of (...) compositeness may be recovered in the regime where the mass of a bound state is close to a multi-particle threshold. -/- Finally, we see that rejecting compositeness solves several of the "problems of everyday objects" encountered in an undergraduate metaphysics course. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse and encouraged an appeal to a wide range of social indicators of trustworthiness in order to decide whom to trust. We analyze public discourse on expertise by examining how social indicators inform the reputation of Dr. Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who rose to international prominence as an early advocate for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. To (...) comprehend how these indicators came to inform his reputation, we outline Dr. Raoult's rise to fame based on discourse about hydroxychloroquine. We then discuss why we trust in experts like scientist-practitioners. This is followed by an examination of how social indicators of trust like status, epistemic authority, influence and values have informed Dr. Raoult's reputation. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the selection and evaluation social indicators of trust and reputations. Our aim here, instead of making a claim about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Raoult's reputation per se, is to outline through this case study how social indicators of trust inform reputation and the challenge they present to evaluating expertise. (shrink)

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze coordination. But (...) are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world. (shrink)

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

Replacing the value-free ideal (VFI) for science requires attention to the broader understanding of how science in society should function. In public spaces, science needed to project the VFI in norms for science advising, science education, and science communication. This resulted in the independent science advisor model and a focus on science literacy for science education and communication. Attending to these broader implications of the VFI which structure science and society relationships is crucial if we are to properly replace the (...) VFI with a better ideal. (shrink)

Sometimes we learn through the use of imagination. The epistemology of imagination asks how this is possible. One barrier to progress on this question has been a lack of agreement on how to characterize imagination; for example, is imagination a mental state, ability, character trait, or cognitive process? This paper argues that we should characterize imagination as a cognitive ability, exercises of which are cognitive processes. Following dual process theories of cognition developed in cognitive science, the set of imaginative processes (...) is then divided into two kinds: one that is unconscious, uncontrolled, and effortless, and another that is conscious, controlled, and effortful. This paper outlines the different epistemological strengths and weaknesses of the two kinds of imaginative process, and argues that a dual process model of imagination helpfully resolves or clarifies issues in the epistemology of imagination and the closely related epistemology of thought experiments. (shrink)

In this article, I suggest that combining resources from philosophy and psychology can yield useful tools for philosophical counselling. More specifically, I argue for three theses: a) Iris Murdoch’s notion of just attention and Marshall Rosenberg’s method of non-violent communication are interestingly compatible; b) engaging in non-violent communication serves to support one’s endeavors to acquire the kind of clear vision Murdoch thinks doing well by others requires; and c) non-violent just communication would be beneficial to both counsellors and counselees and (...) thus a useful resource for philosophical counsellors. (shrink)

If what we believe can directly modify our (visual) experience, our experience is doxastically variable. If so, the following seems possible: our false and irrational background beliefs can modify our experience such that in it, things look distorted, or that it conforms with and appears to confirm the false and irrational beliefs that helped bring it about in the first place. If experience is doxastically variable, it seems, its epistemic function can be undermined. However, in this dissertation, I argue that (...) we can devise accounts of (visual) experience that meet two requirements: they are fully compatible with all kinds of doxastic variation and on them, even doxastically variable experience serves to rationally constrain our beliefs. I begin with a novel interpretation of Hanson’s account of theory-laden observation—a valiant, yet ultimately unsuccessful attempt to meet both these requirements. Next, I analyze and reject various contemporary relationalist accounts of experience and the most sophisticated recent representationalist attempt to accommodate phenomena of doxastic variation: Siegel’s (Rich) Content View. Then, based on the lessons learned and drawing on Hanson’s and Gupta’s work, I show what shape a successful account may take. Ultimately, I argue for the following theses: 1) Neither of the two dominant accounts of experience—relationalism and standard representationalism—currently succeeds in satisfactorily meeting both requirements. 2) To arrive at accounts that do meet them, we should drop both the restrictive relationalist conception of experience as a relation to mind-independent items and the standard representationalist conception of experience as justifying beliefs. 3) We make progress by adopting both the general conception of experience as making rational transitions to beliefs, judgments, and actions and a (slightly) modified version of Gupta’s presentationalist account of experiential phenomenology. Finally, 4) the possibility of devising successful accounts is independent of a major issue dividing relationalists and representationalists: whether experience has content. In the final chapters, I address various follow-up questions concerning the nature of views, conceptual capacities, conceptual content, and linkages between a subject’s experience and her responses. In concluding, I show that the account of experience I recommend is widely applicable in philosophy and beyond. (shrink)

Supra-Bayesianism is the Bayesian response to learning the opinions of others. Probability pooling constitutes an alternative response. One natural question is whether there are cases where probability pooling gives the supra-Bayesian result. This has been called the problem of Bayes-compatibility for pooling functions. It is known that in a common prior setting, under standard assumptions, linear pooling cannot be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. We show by contrast that geometric pooling can be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. Indeed, we show that, under certain assumptions, geometric and (...) Bayes-compatible pooling are equivalent. Granting supra-Bayesianism its usual normative status, one upshot of our study is thus that, in a certain class of epistemic contexts, geometric pooling enjoys a normative advantage over linear pooling as a social learning mechanism. We discuss the philosophical ramifications of this advantage, which we show to be robust to variations in our statement of the Bayes-compatibility problem. (shrink)

What is sexual orientation? The contemporary consensus among philosophers is that it is a disposition. Unsurprisingly, recent debates about the metaphysics of sexual orientation are almost entirely intramural. Behavioral dispositionalists argue that sexual orientation is a disposition to behave sexually. Desire dispositionalists argue that it is a disposition to desire sexually. We argue that sexual orientation is not best understood in terms of dispositions to behave or dispositions to desire before arguing that dispositions tout court fail to illuminate sexual orientation. (...) We then introduce and defend the idea that sexual orientation is best understood in terms of categorical phenomenal properties of sexual arousal. (shrink)

This article constructively retrieves St. Anselm of Canterbury’s theory of retributive justice and provides a defense of what can be called the retributive model of hell. In the first part of this article, we develop the place of retributive punishment in Anselm’s thinking and discuss how and when retributive punishment is a good thing. In the second part, we apply Anselm’s thinking on retributive justice to the problem of hell and provide a defense of how hell, defined as a state (...) of receiving retributive, damnatory, and irreversible punishment, is good. We then address a series of objections. Despite some criticism that both Anselm and the retributive model of hell receive in the contemporary literature, Anselm’s account of retributive justice can make unique and constructive contributions to the contemporary discussion of hell; by retrieving and applying Anselm’s thought to the problem of hell, we intend to kill two birds with one stone. (shrink)