Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power (...) that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces. (shrink)

To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice? Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, (...) then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...) everyone is rational, no one will cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems. (shrink)

The epistemic regress problem targets our ability to provide reasons for our beliefs. If we need reasons for our beliefs, then we may also need to provide reasons for those reasons, and so on into regress. Because the epistemic regress problem is often cast as an attack on our ability to achieve justification, it is often thought that epistemic positions which do not rely on notions like justification escape without difficulty. The first goal of this dissertation is to establish the (...) generality of the epistemic regress problem, beyond all technicalities regarding the nature of justification. To do this, I propose a new minimal epistemic standard, that we should hold no bald assertions to be epistemically acceptable. I then use this epistemic standard to construct two new forms of the epistemic regress problem. The first version of the problem is reminiscent of the classical problem in that it attacks our ability to locate any such reason. The second version of the problem attacks our ability to unite any such reason to a particular claim that it is supposed to support. The second goal of this dissertation is to argue that pragmatism fails as a solution to the epistemic regress problem. The pragmatist seeks to avoid the regress by provisionally accepting their beliefs to be evaluated later. In so doing, the pragmatist seeks to have reasonable beliefs, but only after having accepted them provisionally. After eliminating other theoretical alternatives that the pragmatist may use to bolster their position, I argue that the pragmatic solution is not successful because (1) it is committed to some foundational beliefs that are necessary to facilitate the evaluation of their provisional beliefs which fall prey to the regress, and (2) the employment of these criteria of evaluation encounters the regress in its second form. I conclude by advocating for an understanding of Pyrrhonian skepticism under which we are not required to eschew our everyday beliefs that is nevertheless commensurate with the epistemic regress. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

The entry of resonance into chemistry, or the reception of the theory of resonance in the chemical community, has drawn considerable attention from historians of science. In particular, they have noted Pauling's ¯amboyant yet effective style of exposition, which became a factor in the early popularity of the resonance theory in comparison to the molecular orbital theory, another way of applying quantum mechanics to chemical problems.$ To be sure, the non-mathematical presentation of the resonance theory by Pauling and his collaborator, (...) George Wheland, helped to facilitate the reception ; but this presentation was vulnerable to the confusion that arose among chemists owing to the similarity between resonance and tautomerism, or between foreign and indigenous concepts. The reception occurred at the expense of serious misunderstandings about resonance. This paper investigates the ways in which Pauling and Wheland taught, and taught about, the theory of resonance, especially their ways of coping with the difficulties of translating a quantum-mechanical concept into chemical language. Their different strategies for teaching resonance theory deserve a thorough examination, not only because the strategies had to do with their solutions of the philosophical question whether resonance is a real phenomenon or not, and whether the theory of resonance is a chemical theory or a mathematical method of approximation, but also because this examination will illuminate the role of chemical translators in the transmission of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

This paper revisits the “Hwang case,” which shook Korean society and the world of stem cell research in 2005 with the fraudulent claim of creating patient-specific embryonic stem cells. My goal is to overcome a human-centered, Korea-oriented narrative, by illustrating how materials can have an integral role in the construction and judgment of fraud. To this end, I pay attention to Woo Suk Hwang’s lab at Seoul National University as a whole, including human and nonhuman agents, that functioned as what (...) I call sociomaterial technology, and Gerald P. Schatten at the University of Pittsburgh, Hwang’s collaborator, who played a crucial role in demonstrating the potency of this technology to the members of the scientific community. By recasting the whole event as the “case of Hwang and Schatten,” I argue that fraud is, like all knowledge claims, a sociotechnical construct, and that matters of fraud are locally judged. Fraud leaves its mark on materials, but I show that material evidence alone never tells the whole story and instead can be used to limit the range of responsibility. (shrink)

Karl Popper rightly contests the possibility of a verification of basic statements. At the same time he strictly believes in the possibility of growth of empirical knowledge. Knowledge growth, however, is only possible if empirical theories can be falsified. This raises the question, how theories can be falsified, if a verification of those statements that falsify theories – i.e. basic statements – is not possible. This problem is often referred to as the “basic problem” or “problem of the empirical basis”. (...) In this paper I show that – from a logical point of view – a falsification of theories is possible without a verification of basic state-ments. Furthermore I show that knowledge growth in the empirical sciences will be possible if two assumptions are valid. These assumptions can neither be proven nor falsified. However, they have to be postulated by everybody in eve-ryday life. (shrink)

As the title of the article suggests, “The Burqa Ban”: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations, the authors embark on a factually investigative as well as a reflective response. More precisely, they use The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Message (published as a concurrent but separate article in this issue of INTERNATIONAL STUDIES JOURNAL) as a platform for further analysis and discussion of different perspectives. These include (...) case-law at the international level while focusing attention on recent rulings and judicial reasoning by the ECtHR and the ECJ; critical thought-experiments in religion, morality, human rights, and the democratic public space; a contextualized account of burqa-wearing interventions by federal and state governments and, moreover, various courts in the United States; and philosophical commentary and, in some instances, criticism of the Danish and/or European (French, etc.) approach. The different contributions have different aims. The section on case-law at the international level reports on those central judgments that, in effect, helped to pave the path for the Kingdom of Denmark’s burqa ban. Concerning the concurring judges at the ECtHR, the opinions served to uphold a preexisting ban and to grant a wide margin of appreciation to the national authorities, thereby limiting the Court’s own review. -/- As regards to the ECJ, the legality of company rules that contain a policy of neutrality for the workplace was examined, with a similar outcome. The authors who discuss religion, morality, human rights and the democratic public space are endeavoring to, respectively, appeal to ethics as a testing stone for law and to both challenge and address several forms of “expressivist worry” in connection with face veils. In doing so, the authors ask a number of thought-provoking questions that hopefully will inspire public policymakers to careful analysis. While the section that is devoted to American perspectives highlights a comprehensive survey of political and legal responses to, in particular, full-face veils like the burqa, the relevant author also incorporates public perceptions and, in the course of examining these, draws a parallel to “the fate” of the hoodie. The constitutionality of burqa-wearing in America, so it also appears, is partially an open question, but differentiating between religious, political, or personal reasons is a de jure premise. Given that the Danish legislators who drafted law L 219 to ban burqa-wearing in public places rely on a reference to political Islam, they relegate religious and personal reasons to the private domain, thereby also adopting secularism as a premise. This is explored in the last author response of the article, more precisely, in an account of the underlying materialism that, in turn, is applied to Muslim women. If policymakers and legislators engaged in Thinking Things Through exercises, they could, as a minimum, avoid law-making strategies that are not in the spirit of the theory they themselves invoke, albeit tacitly. While the aim of, as it were, arresting culturally self-contradicting legislators is unique for the section in question, all the authors who contribute to the joint research project have one end-goal in common, namely to inform about important perspectives while at the same time opening up for parameters for (more) fruitful, constructive and (if need be) critical debate in the future. With this in mind, four recommendations are presented by the research director for the project. Legally, politically, socially and culturally, conflict-resolution should not translate the relationship between rulers and the ruled into a separation ideology, an instance of controllers versus the controlled. All things being equal, that is the objective limit for a democratic society. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

We are in a time of rapid change on multiple levels. Change can be seen as positive by one group and negative by another. As a result, different perspectives on any given change can draw completely different conclusions. In these proceedings we want to address different approaches to change from all kinds of perspectives within the realm of citizen science and participatory research. We discuss both active, transformative change, and the observation of change monitored by citizen science in all kinds (...) of disciplines. We highlight the potential of citizen science to be a change maker in research and society, and as a tool to manage the change happening around us. The proceedings "Change - The transformative power of citizen science" showcase a selection of topics that have been presented and discussed at the ECSA/ACSC 2024 double conference in Vienna and highlight the transformative power, citizen science can have. (shrink)

RESUMO Versa o presente artigo sobre a regulação do linchamento no Direito Romano do período antigo, em especial sobre o artigo 9º da Tábua III das Leis das XII Tábuas. A partir de uma metodologia de análise qualitativa, revisão bibliográfica e interpretação textual, os autores objetivam ampliar a visão tradicional sobre o linchamento, compreendendo a institucionalização de sua prática no Direito Romano e sua função no contexto de formação da cultura jurídica do período antigo. A hipótese de trabalho é a (...) de que o artigo 9º da Tábua III das Leis das XII Tábuas apresenta, historicamente, uma forma de punição intermediária entre a linchamento popular extralegal e a pena criminal prevista em lei. Do ponto de vista jurídico-antropológico, a comprovação da hipótese permitiria concluir a ideia de que a pena praticada na antiguidade é uma evolução do controle social informal da violência. Palavras-chave: Linchamento; Direito Romano; XII Tábuas; Pena criminal. ABSTRACT The following paper is about the lynching regulation in Roman law in Ancient Era, especially in what comes about the article 9 of Table Three from Twelve Tables. Making use of a methodology based in qualitative analisys, literature review and interpretation, the auctor aim to expande the traditional view about lynching, understanding the institutionalization of their practice in Roman Law and it’s function in the legal culture in Ancient Era. The working hipothesis is that the article 9 of Table Three of Twelve Tables presents, in a historical context, a intermediate form of punishment between extralegal collective lynching and criminal penalty provided by law. From a legal-anthropological point of view, the proof of the hypothesis would allow us to conclude the idea that the penalty practiced in antiquity is an evolution of informal social control of violence. Keywords: Lynching; Roman Law; Twelve Tables; Criminal Penalty. (shrink)

In arguing against the likelihood of consciousness in non-human animals, Descartes advances a slippery slope argument that if thought were attributed to any one animal, it would have to be attributed to all, which is absurd. This paper examines the foundations of Thomas Willis’ comparative neuroanatomy against the background of Descartes’ slippery slope argument against animal consciousness. Inspired by Gassendi’s ideas about the corporeal soul, Thomas Willis distinguished between neural circuitry responsible for reflex behaviour and that responsible for cognitively or (...) consciously mediated behaviour. This afforded Willis a non-arbitrary basis for distinguishing between animals with thought and consciousness and those without, a methodology which retains currency for neuroscience today. (shrink)

Andre Willis argues that although Hume is generally credited with being a “devastating critic” of religion, it is a mistake to view Hume solely in these terms or to present him as an “atheist.” This not only represents a failure to appreciate Hume’s “middle path” between “militant atheists and evangelical theists”, it denies us an opportunity to “enhance” our understanding and appreciation of the positive, constructive value of religion through a close study of Hume’s views. Willis’s study presents Hume as (...) committed to a “bifurcated approach to religion” that rests on the fundamental distinction between “false religion” and “true religion”. False religion, which includes Christianity, is a... (shrink)

There are numerous theoretical reasons which are usually said to undermine the case for mental causation. But in recent years, Libet‘s experiment on readiness potentials (Libet, Wright, and Gleason 1982; Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl 1983), and a more recent replication by a research team led by John Dylan Haynes (Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.J., and Haynes, J.-D. [2008]) are often singled out because they appear to demonstrate empirically that consciousness is not causally involved in our choices and (...) actions. In this paper, an alternative interpretation of these studies is offered; one which is in accordance both with the empirical evidence and also with the phenomenology of the will, demonstrating that the two opposing views of agency – both the ones that deny the reality of free will and the ones that affirm it – are equally compatible with the outcomes of these two experiments. On this basis, it is shown that the claim that the results on the timing of readiness potential tip the scales in favour of one or the other view cannot be justified - neither from a neurological, nor from a philosophical perspective. (shrink)

Eyal et al have recently argued that researchers should consider conducting severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) human challenge studies to hasten vaccine development. We have conducted (J. L.) and overseen (L. D.) human challenge studies and agree that they can be useful in developing anti-infective agents. We also agree that adults can autonomously choose to undergo risks with no prospect of direct benefit to themselves. However, we disagree that SARS-CoV-2 challenge studies are ethically appropriate at this time, for (...) 3 reasons: (1) current scientific knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 infection is insufficient to manage risks; (2) autonomous decision making, while necessary, does not override concerns about risk; and (3) undertaking challenge studies now would imperil confidence in the research enterprise, potentially undermining the global response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. (shrink)

In my first year at the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley); I was required to read Oscar Cullmann's <b> Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead? </b> (1956). I was shocked and dumbfounded by what I discovered. Giving my religious instruction under the guidance of the Ursuline nuns at Holy Cross Grade School, it never entered my mind that Jesus did not believe that every person had an immortal soul that survived the death of the body. After a (...) single reading, however, I suddenly realized that Jesus never endorsed the immortality of the soul. I suffered a crisis of faith--I realized that my Catholic upbringing had been contaminated by dubious ideas that originated with Socrates.<br> More recently, the international NT scholar and Bishop N.T. Wright has challenged the Christian churches to drop Socratic ideas and to return to the faith of Jesus:<br> <quote>Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. . . . If God’s good creation—of the world, of life as we know it, or our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams—really is good . . . , then to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong! </quote> In my article, I use my personal story to illustrate how Socratic doctrines had distorted my faith in Jesus. I use my training in historical theology to illustrate (a) how Socrates became the patron saint of the Church Fathers; (b) how Jesus' mission in Hades expanded during the first three centuries; and (c) how Hades began as a cool place where the souls of saints and sinners resided together and ended up as a hot place where grave sinners were eternally tormented. Along the way, I show how Socrates failed to resolve key issues such as (a) whether the soul survives death; (b) whether communication between souls is even possible after death; and (c) whether souls in the heavenly realm are locked in a permanent coma. In brief, I supply N.T. Wright with massive evidence of just how "utterly wrong" the "going to Heaven" movement has been.<br><br> Note: I just finished this paper and hope to publish it. Any help you can give me to improve its readability or content, would be appreciated. (shrink)

When developing phylogenetic systematics, the entomologist Willi Hennig adopted elements from Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology. In this historical essay I take on the task of documenting this adoption. I argue that in order to build a metaphysical foundation for phylogenetic systematics, Hennig adopted from Hartmann four main metaphysical theses. These are (1) that what is real is what is temporal; (2) that the criterion of individuality is to have duration; (3) that species are supra-individuals; and (4) that there are levels of (...) reality, each of which may be subject to different kinds of law. Reliance on Hartmann’s metaphysics allowed Hennig to ground some of the main theoretical principles of phylogenetic systematics, namely that the biological categories—from the semaphoront to the highest rank—have reality and individuality despite not being universals, and that they form a hierarchy of levels, each of which may require different kinds of explanation. Hartmann’s metaphysics thereby provided a philosophical justification for Hennig’s phylogenetic systematics, both as a theory and as a method of classification. (shrink)

In this article I contrast 17th and 18th explanations of hysteria including those of Sydenham and Willis with those given by Plato and pre-modern medicine. I show that beginning in the second decade of the 17th century the locus of the disorder was transferred to the nervous system and it was no longer connected with the womb as in Hippocrates and Galen; hysteria became identified with hypochondria, and was a disease contracted by men as well as women. I discuss the (...) purely mechanical explanation of hysteria given by Robert Boyle who attributed its cause to corporeal ideas as well as overly sensitive disposition of the nervous system. I relate this the mechanical theory of the nervous system prominent in Descartes' writings on physiology. The paper closes with a discussion of the contrast between early modern explanations of hysteria and the nature of man with those of Freud in the early 20th century. (shrink)

Soon there will be sex robots. The creation of such devices raises a host of social, legal and ethical questions. In this article, I focus in on one of them. What if these sex robots are deliberately designed and used to replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse? Should the creation and use of such robots be criminalised, even if no person is harmed by the acts performed? I offer an argument for thinking that they should be. The (...) argument consists of two premises. The first claims that it can be a proper object of the criminal law to regulate wrongful conduct with no extrinsically harmful effects on others. The second claims that the use of robots that replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse would be wrongful, even if such usage had no extrinsically harmful effects on others. I defend both premises of this argument and consider its implications for the criminal law. I do not offer a conclusive argument for criminalisation, nor would I wish to be interpreted as doing so; instead, I offer a tentative argument and a framework for future debate. This framework may also lead one to question the proposed rationales for criminalisation. (shrink)

Soon after taking power, three leaders of nonviolent African independence movements, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia immediately turned to violent means to suppress internal opposition. The paper examines the reasons for the success of their Gandhian nonviolent tactics in ousting British colonial governments and argues that these new heads of state lost confidence in nonviolence due to a mixture of self-serving expediency, a lack of understanding of nonviolence's many different forms, and (...) the constraints of inheriting a state already dependent on the use of force. (shrink)

Very soon after Philippa Foot’s death, there was a flood of newspaper obituaries and ‘posts’ on blogs referring to her as one of the greatest moral philosophers of the twentieth century. She was also, though very few of the writers were in a position to say so, a particularly loyal Somervillian. She read PPE at Somerville during the war, started teaching there after war work in London in 1947, became its first Philosophy Tutorial Fellow in 1949, Vice Principal in (...) 1967, and, although she resigned her Fellowship in 1969, she retained, as a Senior Research Fellow and then Honorary Fellow, very close links with the College and Somervillians, past and present, until the end. (shrink)

Will brain imaging technology soon enable neuroscientists to read minds? We cannot answer this question without some understanding of the state of the art in neuroimaging. But neither can we answer this question without some understanding of the concept invoked by the term "mind reading." This article is an attempt to develop such understanding. Our analysis proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, we provide a categorical explication of mind reading. The categorical explication articulates empirical conditions that must (...) be satisfied if mind reading is to be achieved. In the second stage, we develop a metric for judging the proficiency of mind reading experiments. The conception of mind reading that emerges helps to reconcile folk psychological judgments about what mind reading must involve with the constraints imposed by empirical strategies for achieving it. (shrink)

Patients with serious illnesses or injuries may decide to quit their medical treatment if they think paying the fees will put their families into destitution. Without treatment, it is likely that fatal outcomes will soon follow. We call this phenomenon “near-suicide”. This study attempted to explore this phenomenon by examining how the seriousness of the patient’s illness or injury and the subjective evaluation of the patient’s and family’s financial situation after paying treatment fees affect the final decision on the (...) treatment process. Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics were employed to analyze a dataset of 1042 Vietnamese patients. We found that the more serious the illnesses or injuries of patients were, the more likely they were to choose to quit treatment if they perceived that paying the treatment fees heavily affected their families’ financial status. Particularly, only one in four patients with the most serious health issues who thought that continuing the treatment would push themselves and their families into destitution would decide to continue the treatment. Considering the information-filtering mechanism using subjective cost–benefit judgments, these patients likely chose the financial well-being and future of their family members over their individual suffering and inevitable death. Our study also demonstrates that mindsponge-based reasoning and BMF analytics can be effective in designing and processing health data for studying extreme psychosocial phenomena. Moreover, we suggest that policymakers implement and adjust their policies (e.g., health insurance) following scientific evidence to mitigate patients’ likelihood of making “near-suicide” decisions and improve social equality in the healthcare system. (shrink)

As soon as you believe an imagination to be nonfictional, this imagination becomes your ontological theory of the reality. Your ontological theory (of the reality) can describe a system as the reality. However, actually this system is only a theory/conceptual-space/imagination/visual-imagery of yours, not the actual reality (i.e., the thing-in-itself). An ontological theory (of the reality) actually only describes your (subjective/mental) imagination/visual-imagery/conceptual-space. An ontological theory of the reality, is being described as a situation model (SM). There is no way to (...) prove/disprove that there is only one reality, or there are two realities (i.e., “subjective reality” and “objective reality”). So, every ontology talk/theory/imagination about the two realities is only a talk/theory/imagination – we will never know whether it is true or not. The conventionally-called “physical/objective reality/world” around my conventionally-called “physical/objective body” is actually a geometric mathematical model (being generated/mathematically-modeled by my brain) – it's actually a subset/component/part/element of my brain’s mind/consciousness/manifest-image. Our cosmos is an autonomous objective parallel computing automaton (aka state machine) which evolves by itself automatically/unintentionally – wave-particle duality and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle can be explained under this SM of my brain. Each elementary particle (as a building block of our cosmos) is an autonomous mathematical entity itself (i.e., a thing in itself). Our cosmos has the same nature as a Game of Life system – both are autonomous objective parallel-computing automata. Cosmos (as a state machine) is indistinguishable from a digital simulation – my consciousness (as something nonphysical) is not cosmos (as a state machine). If we are happy to accept randomness/stochasticity, then it is obviously possible that all other worlds in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) actually do not exist (objectively). As one metaphysical option, we can treat all other worlds as subjective only (even if they are actually objective). Under the context of this metaphysical option, we are only living in one world (i.e., the world we are currently living in; this world) – we are not living in many worlds at the same time parallelly. Under the context of this metaphysical option, there is only one possible future. The relationship among any number of elementary particles, is governed/described by Schrodinger equation. If (in theory) Schrodinger equation can’t be used to reliably forecast whether I will go to McDonald for dinner in this world (based on the current state of all elementary particles of the cosmos), then what can Schrodinger equation do? The conventionally-called “space” does not exist objectively. “Time” and “matter” are not physical. Consciousness is the subjective-form (aka quale) of the mathematical models (of the objective cosmos) which are intracorporeally/subjectively used by the control logic of a Turing machine’s program fatedly. A Turing machine’s mind/consciousness/manifest-image or deliberate decisions/choices should not be able to actually/objectively change/control/drive the (autonomous or fated) worldline of any elementary particle within this world (i.e., the world we are currently living in, under the context of MWI). Besides the Schrodinger equation (or another mathematical equation/function which is yet to be discovered) which is a valid/correct/factual causality of our cosmos/state-machine, every other causality (of our cosmos/state-machine) is either invalid/incorrect/counterfactual or can be proved by deductive inference based on the Schrodinger equation (or the aforementioned yet-to-be-discovered mathematical equation/function) only. Closed causality entails no causality. Consciousness plays no causal role (“epiphenomenalism”), or in other words, any cognitive/behavioural activity can in principle be carried out without consciousness (“conscious inessentialism”). If the “loop quantum gravity” theory is correct, then time/space does not actually/objectively exist in the objective-evolution of the objective cosmos, or in other words, we should not use the subjective/mental concept of “time”, “state” or “space” to describe/imagine the objective-evolution of our cosmos. (shrink)

Can robots have significant moral status? This is an emerging topic of debate among roboticists and ethicists. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, it presents a theory – ‘ethical behaviourism’ – which holds that robots can have significant moral status if they are roughly performatively equivalent to other entities that have significant moral status. This theory is then defended from seven objections. Second, taking this theoretical position onboard, it is argued that the performative threshold that robots need (...) to cross in order to be afforded significant moral status may not be that high and that they may soon cross it (if they haven’t done so already). Finally, the implications of this for our procreative duties to robots are considered, and it is argued that we may need to take seriously a duty of ‘procreative beneficence’ towards robots. (shrink)

In the article titled ‘A new perspective on the race debate’，Robin O. Andreasen argues that contrary to popular scientific belief, human races are biologically real—it is just that we are wrong about them. Andreasen calls her contemporary biological concept of race ‘the cladistic race concept’ (or CRC). Her theory uses theory from cladistics—a systematic school founded by entomologist Willi Hennig in 1950—to define human races genealogically as cladistic subspecies. In this paper I will argue that despite its promise as a (...) biological definition of human races, Andreasen's CRC is unconvincing. In particular, I will show that the central problem of the CRC is its attempt to apply cladistics below the species level. In other words, there is good reason to think that cladistic subspecies are not real, and therefore, they cannot be the target of a realist concept of race. (shrink)

An extensive literature about pictorial representation discusses what is involved when a two-dimensional image represents some specific object or type of object. A smaller literature addresses parallel issues in sculptural representation. But little has been said about the role played by the sculptural material itself in determining the meanings of the sculptural work. Appealing to Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s discussions of literal and metaphorical exemplification, I argue that the material of which a sculpture is constituted plays key roles in (...) what is represented and how it is represented, in part because we have bodily and emotional responses to the real possibilities the sculptural material creates for us. I discuss examples of contemporary artworks by Melvin Edwards, Kara Walker, Willie Cole, Marc Quinn, Ai Weiwei, Janine Antoni, El Anatsui, Zoe Leonard, and others. (shrink)

An Artificially Intelligent system (an AI) has debatable moral personhood if it is epistemically possible either that the AI is a moral person or that it falls far short of personhood. Debatable moral personhood is a likely outcome of AI development and might arise soon. Debatable AI personhood throws us into a catastrophic moral dilemma: Either treat the systems as moral persons and risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of entities without interests worth the sacrifice, or do (...) not treat the systems as moral persons and risk perpetrating grievous moral wrongs against them. The moral issues become even more perplexing if we consider cases of possibly conscious AI that are subhuman, superhuman, or highly divergent from us in their morally relevant properties. (shrink)

The prescriptive force of methodological rules rests, I argue, on the acceptance of scientific theories; that of the most general methodological rules rests on theories in the philosophy of science, which differ from theories in the several sciences only in generality and abstraction. I illustrate these claims by reference to methodological disputes in social science and among philosophers of science. My conclusions substantiate those of Laudan except that I argue for the existence of transtheoretical goals common to all scientists and (...) concrete enough actually to have bearing on methodology. And I argue that Laudan is committed to such goals himself, willy nilly. (shrink)

Many contemporary epistemologists hold that a subject S’s true belief that p counts as knowledge only if S’s belief that p is also, in some important sense, safe. I describe accounts of this safety condition from John Hawthorne, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa. There have been three counterexamples to safety proposed in the recent literature, from Comesaña, Neta and Rohrbaugh, and Kelp. I explain why all three proposals fail: each moves fallaciously from the fact that S was at epistemic risk (...) just before forming her belief to the conclusion that S’s belief was formed unsafely. In light of lessons from their failure, I provide a new and successful counterexample to the safety condition on knowledge. It follows, then, that knowledge need not be safe. Safety at a time depends counterfactually on what would likely happen at that time or soon after in a way that knowledge does not. I close by considering one objection concerning higher-order safety. (shrink)

The convergence of computing, sensing, and communication technology will soon permit large-scale deployment of self-driving vehicles. This will in turn permit a radical transformation of traffic control technology. This paper makes a case for the importance of addressing questions of social justice in this transformation, and sketches a preliminary framework for doing so. We explain how new forms of traffic control technology have potential implications for several dimensions of social justice, including safety, sustainability, privacy, efficiency, and equal access. Our (...) central focus is on efficiency and equal access as desiderata for traffic control design. We explain the limitations of conventional traffic control in meeting these desiderata, and sketch a preliminary vision for a next-generation traffic control tailored to address better the demands of social justice. One component of this vision is cooperative, hierarchically distributed self-organization among vehicles. Another component of this vision is a priority system enabling selection of priority levels by the user for each vehicle trip in the network, based on the supporting structure of non-monetary credits. (shrink)

Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its clear bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little direct attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual’s welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theories of wellbeing, predict that certain existing (...) artificial systems have wellbeing. Along the way, we argue that there are good reasons to believe that artificial systems can have wellbeing even if they are not phenomenally conscious. While we do not claim to demonstrate conclusively that AI systems have wellbeing, we argue that there is a significant probability that some AI systems have or will soon have wellbeing, and that this should lead us to reassess our relationship with the intelligent systems we create. (shrink)

This chapter considers the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to exhibit creativity and imagination, in light of recent advances in generative AI and the use of deep neural networks (DNNs). Reasons for doubting that AI exhibits genuine creativity or imagination are considered, including the claim that the creativity of an algorithm lies in its developer, that generative AI merely reproduces patterns in its training data, and that AI is lacking in a necessary feature for creativity or imagination, such as consciousness, (...) agency, metacognitive awareness, or the use of mental imagery. In each case, a counterargument is provided that AI already has or soon will overcome the apparent barrier. In some instances, this is because the critical features deemed lacking in AI may not be necessary for human creativity and imagination either. In others, it is because important developmental and structural similarities between humans and generative AI have been insufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

A substantial proportion of human embryos spontaneously abort soon after conception, and ethicists have argued this is problematic for the pro-life view that a human embryo has the same moral status as an adult from conception. Firstly, if human embryos are our moral equals, this entails spontaneous abortion is one of humanity’s most important problems, and it is claimed this is absurd, and a reductio of the moral status claim. Secondly, it is claimed that pro-life advocates do not act (...) as if spontaneous abortion is important, implying they are failing to fulfill their moral obligations. We report that the primary cause of spontaneous abortion is chromosomal defects, which are currently unpreventable, and show that as the other major cause of prenatal death is induced abortion, pro-life advocates can legitimately continue efforts to oppose it. We also defend the relevance of the killing and letting die distinction, which provides further justification for pro-life priorities. (shrink)

Samuel seeks out Kurt at a pub and initiates a discussion. Soon Kurt becomes engaged. What is it that is incomplete?

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)

Perceptual dogmatism holds that if it perceptually seems to S that P, then S thereby has prima facie perceptual justification for P. But suppose Wishful Willy's desire for gold cognitively penetrates his perceptual experience and makes it seem to him that the yellow object is a gold nugget. Intuitively, his desire-penetrated seeming can't provide him with prima facie justification for thinking that the object is gold. If this intuitive response is correct, dogmatists have a problem. But if dogmatists have a (...) problem, you do too (well, most of you anyway). Reliabilists have denounced dogmatism's cognitive penetration problems, but they have problems with cognitive penetration that are even worse. (shrink)

How does Locke contribute to the development of 18th-century projects for a science of the mind, even though he seems to reject or at least bracket off such an idea himself? Contrary to later understandings of empiricism, Locke goes out of his way to state that his project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2). Locke further specifies that this (...) means his analysis of mental processes will not engage with knowledge of the brain (e.g. in terms of corpuscles and animal spirits), even though he had been the student of Thomas Willis. Now, Kant seemed to make an elementary mistake, given such a clear statement on Locke’s part, when he claimed that Locke’s project was a “physiology of the understanding” (in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). One can ask of course what this physiology of the understanding was, and if it existed, in or out of the Lockean intellectual world (as I have sought to investigate in a 2016 paper). This leads me to inquire into the outcome of his empiricism for a scientific treatment of the mind, including in the sense of a ‘naturalization’ of the mind (with implications also for our understanding of empiricism: Anstey’s influential distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy does not seem useful here). Because if Kant made this charge, there were also many 18th-century thinkers who positively treated Locke as their great forerunner in psychology and related fields: Charles Bonnet and Joseph Priestley among them, just as some prominent physicians such as Cabanis claimed to be ‘finishing the job’ that Locke had started in, e.g. their materialist theories of the passions. What one might term ‘the Locke Problem’ here is: how can one reconcile empiricism and claims about cerebral processes, while seeking to remain a Lockean? Differently put, what is the process of naturalization, a naturalization of? (shrink)

Book synopsis: New work on a hot topic by an outstanding team of authors At the intersection of several central areas of philosophy It is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their (...) representational task. A team of leading experts presents new essays on the much-debated problem of empty reference and thought. In the 1960s and 1970s Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam initiated a revolution in the then standard conception of reference—a concept at the core of philosophical inquiry. The repercussions of the revolution, particularly felt in metaphysics and epistemology, were soon refined by other influential writers such as Tyler Burge, Gareth Evans, and John Perry. They argued that some linguistic and mental representations have contents individuated by what they are about—by ordinary referents of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, definite descriptions and common nouns, i.e. by planets, people or natural kinds. The view was at odds with a central philosophical presumption at that time: that cognitive and linguistic access to objective reality is indirect and accidental, mediated by general descriptive characterizations, the only constitutive semantic feature of the expressions; hence its ontological and epistemological repercussions. A turning-point in the debate about how linguistic and mental representation reach external contents concerned the nature of empty mental and linguistic representations, framed by means of the very same expressions crucially invoked in the Donnellan-Kaplan-Kripke-Putnam arguments. The papers in this volume address different aspects of reference and thought about the non-existent. (shrink)

In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. (...) However, this work will be difficult, because we lack the same kinds of commonalities across substrates that we have within them. Fortunately, we might be able to make at least some intersubstrate welfare comparisons responsibly in spite of these issues. We make the case for cautious optimism and call for more research. (shrink)

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)