Creating and caring for a garden is a long-term project whose success requires commitment and devotion and love and proper performance of a range of activities that involve virtues and sensibilities like attentiveness, carefulness, humility, imaginativeness, and sensitivity to the natures and needs of plants and animals. In this chapter, I elaborate this conception of gardens and explore its relationship to artistic activities, like composing poetry or performing music. My focus are Confucianism and Daosim and their accounts of the relationships (...) between cultured practices, ethics and the arts, and garden-practices. (shrink)

Culture or Biology? The question can seem deep and important. Yet, I argue in this chapter, if you are enthralled by questions about our biological differences, then you are probably confused. My goal is to diagnose the confusion. In debates about the role of biology in the social world it is easy to ask the wrong questions, and it is easy to misinterpret the scientific research. We are intuitively attracted to what is called psychological essentialism, and therefore interpret what is (...) biological as what can be traced to “essences”. On this interpretation, it would be deep and important to know what about, say, the differences between the genders is biological: it would correspond to what is essential to being a man or being a woman, and be opposed to what is a mere accidental feature that some women or some men have. Yet, the psychological essentialist understanding of ‘biological differences’ is deeply mistaken about biology. It has the wrong conception of biological kinds, of biological heritability, and of how genes and hormones work. Those who argue for an important role of ‘biology’ in the explanation of human differences often see ‘the science’ on their side. But this is false – on the interpretation of ‘biological differences’ that is most intuitive and that makes the question appear to be most interesting. Defenders of ‘biology’ often have the science against them. What is often called ‘biology’ is a myth: a myth created by an intuitive tendency that grotesquely distorts real biological research. (shrink)

Marginalized communities are confronted with issues resulting from their marginalization, such as exclusion, invisibility, misrepresentation, and hate speech, not only offline but – due to digital change – increasingly online. Our research project DigitalDialog21 aims at evaluating the effects of digital change on society and how digital change, and the risks and possibilities that come with it, is perceived by the population. Digital change is understood as a factor of social change in this project. By investigating digital change and its (...) effects on society, we are able to draw more general inferences on how societies change socially and what needs to be done in education to establish digital trust. In 2017 the Digital Evolution Index observed an increasing trust deficit and skepticism towards digitalization in both very industrialized and lesser industrialized countries. We will draw inferences from these observations here and hypothesize the following: It seems that especially in marginalized communities, that is: in communities that are structurally and systemically disadvantaged and that experience societal marginalization, this trust deficit and skepticism towards digitalization is prevalent. This could be so because, as a member of a marginalized community, one might quickly find issues resulting from marginalization to be present in digital spaces just like they are present in non-digital spaces. This paper will examine critically how attitudes in marginalized communities towards digital media are influenced by digital change. Do the risks of digitalization outweigh the advantages for marginalized communities? Are digital media perceived to provide advantages such as increased visibility and representation or are they perceived to fuel discrimination against marginalized people? Our research project brings together secondary analyses of existing studies with the results of our own qualitative interview study on marginalized people's perceptions of digital change. The paper will portray some example interviews, and thereby analyze if and how attitudes in the margins towards digital media change, what this change consists of, and how we can understand the changing attitudes within an ethical and educational framework. Our findings will point at a necessity to increase ethically based digital literacy (PEAT) in the German education system, starting in early education. Marginalized groups in particular must be empowered to become digitally competent through problem-oriented education. Independent self-efficacy can increase digital trust in fragmented societies. The paper concludes by introducing media ethics tools that are being developed as part of the project. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it reflects on how it is possible to enjoy the freedom envisaged in the Zhuangzi. Many discussions welcome the Zhuangzi’s picture of release from life shaped by canonical visions, without also giving thought to life without these driving visions. Consider this scenario: in a world with limitless possibilities, would it not be (...) fraught, not knowing how to interpret situations? I suggest that freedom in the Zhuangzi is possible only if one succeeds in reorienting herself to the new ‘normal’. Second, I introduce and develop the idea of working with constraints. This focuses on an agent's maximizing the fit between relevant conditions, on the one hand, and their capabilities, on the other. Finally, I propose that self-directed practice, an important expression of agency, is required for building capabilities that enable such freedom. I examine the idea of risk involved in these firsthand experiences, articulating an account of agency that sits at the heart of hard-won Zhuangzian freedom. (shrink)

This chapter argues that emotion recognition is a skill. A skill perspective on emotion recognition draws attention to underappreciated features of this cornerstone of social cognition. Skills have a number of characteristic features. For example, they are improvable, practical, and flexible. Emotion recognition has these features as well. Leading theories of emotion recognition often draw inadequate attention to these features. The chapter advances a theory of emotion recognition that is better suited to this purpose. It proposes that emotion recognition involves (...) scripts. Emotion scripts describe how people are likely to behave in different emotional contexts. Scripts can be improved with the addition of richer social knowledge, they are practical in that they describe and guide social interaction, and they are flexible because they must accommodate the fact that emotions have different behavioral impact depending on the agents involved and the circumstances at play. Learning to recognize emotions through scripts qualifies as a skill. (shrink)

Discussion of cognitive scaffolding is dominated by attention to ways that external structure can support cognitive activity or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call instances where the interests of the user are served benign and argue for the possibility of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to rely on external structure, but that undermines or exploits that agent while serving the interests of another. We offer one defence of hostile scaffolding by (...) developing an account of a neglected complementarity between extended phenotype thinking and extended functionalism. We support this with a second defence, an account of design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that show how they exemplify hostile scaffolding. (shrink)

Common sense has it that some of the greatest achievements that are to our credit are creative, whether artistic or otherwise. But standard theories of achievement and merit struggle to explain them, since the praiseworthiness of creative achievements isn’t grounded in effort, quality of will, disclosing the agent’s values, or even reasons-responsiveness. I argue that it’s distinctive of artistic or quasi-artistic creative activity that it is guided by what I call aspirational aims, which are formulated in terms of evaluative predicates (...) (like painting something “moving” or engineering something “nifty”) whose descriptive realizers are not known in advance. Aesthetic creativity itself fundamentally consists in perceiving or conceiving of some modification of raw material or a medium as promoting or constituting a novel way of realizing the aspirational aim. Creative achievements like poems and paintings are then to our credit in virtue of being exercises of spontaneity that disclose a deep layer of our selves that is manifest in active perception of affordances, showing that there is something beautiful about the way we experience the world, as a Sally Rooney character puts it. As with other creditworthy achievements, what makes them difficult is that simply trying won’t suffice to make success likely – but unlike in many other cases, neither will trying hard, since we have no direct volitional or rational control over perceptual spontaneity. (shrink)

In his rich and suggestive paper, Alvaro Vallejo argues for the novel thesis that Plato posits a form of pleasure in the Republic and the Philebus. Vallejo argues that the notion of a Platonic form of pleasure best explains other things that Plato says about pleasure. First, Plato draws a distinction between true pleasure and the appearance of pleasure. Second, Plato uses the same language to de- scribe the relationship between forms and their inferior instantiations as he uses to describe (...) the relationship between true and false pleasures. In these com- ments, I argue that we do not need to posit a form of pleasure to explain these features of the text. Moreover, I argue that on Vallejo’s account of the form of pleasure, the form could not do the job required of it, namely, it could not ex- plain the problem with false pleasures. (shrink)

Plato’s Socrates holds that we always have reason to be just, since being just is essential for living a happy and successful life. In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ main interlocutor, Glaucon, raises a vivid and powerful challenge to this claim. He presents the case of Gyges, a Lydian shepherd who possesses a ring that gives him the power of invisibility. Glaucon’s contention is that Gyges does not have reason to be just in this circumstance, since being just will (...) not promote his happiness. Thus, the argument poses the following challenge: what reason do we have to be just, particularly in circumstances where we can get away with injustice? In this essay, we describe Glaucon’s challenge, highlight its similarity to challenges offered by other skeptical figures in the history of philosophy, namely, Hobbes’ Foole and Hume’s sensible knave, and present three broad lines of response. (shrink)

In this paper I will compare Hertz and Wittgenstein in order to bring forth a new interpretation of the Tractatus. I shall look at Wittgenstein’s ideas about simple objects and compare them with Hertz’s material particles. I shall then claim that if one understands Hertz’s material particles as logical entities that are more co-ordinate like than physical, one can reach an interpretation of the Tractatus that is deliberately silent about the nature of reality, therefore escaping both objectivist and subjectivist interpretations (...) of the book. This, I think, is just one of the great results of re-thinking Wittgenstein’s ideas through Hertz’s. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 189-210, Fall 2021.

This is an early, alternative version of the paper that became Shieber 2013, “Toward a truly social epistemology: Babbage, the division of mental labor, and the possibility of socially distributed warrant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 86(2), pp. 266-294. This paper differs from the later paper in a few notable respects. In this earlier paper – written in 2008-9 – I use Hutchins to illustrate the phenomenon of socially distributed cognitive processes, rather than Babbage, and I discuss the attributes of such (...) cognitive processes in greater detail. (shrink)

Inside the family, all individuals define their identity in relation to previous generations, the present ones, and the future ones. This intergenerational exchange plays important educational roles: it fosters a sense of belonging and identification, promotes dialogue, and guarantees the passing down of ethical orientations. In addition to feelings of security and reliance on others, family memory creates a matrix that gives people a placement in the world, a sort of existential code through which to be located in existence. Fostering (...) the habit of memory-making becomes therefore a major educational imperative, which however is not without challenges. The present contribution will consider those phenomena which can give rise to a weakening of bonds between generations and a growing exclusion of the ethical value of family heritage. The educational perspective that will be drawn is that of building a sense of alliance.. (shrink)

The role of metaphysics in critique stands as a defining issue for the Frankfurt School theorists. Max Horkheimer himself claims that metaphysics serves as an instrument of domination, leading him to develop an interdisciplinary mate- rialism as a postmetaphysical alternative. Critics such as Georg Lohmann con- tend, however, that Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason is aporetic insofar as it undermines all metaphysical claims while implicitly making them. Since Horkheimer narrowly equates metaphysics with identity thinking, this article argues that his appeal (...) to nonidentity thinking as the foundation for critique is better understood as a form of antimetaphysics. This, however, leaves Horkheimer no better situated, since antimetaphysics remains a variant of metaphysics. While Horkheimer reproduces the techniques of domination he sought to avoid, this lapse into metaphysics warns of the difficult path that postmetaphysical thinking must navigate between the antipodes of metaphys- ical and antimetaphysical positions. (shrink)

What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But perception is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Most say “yes”. But this is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. The ultimate source of (...) aesthetic knowledge is feeling. In this essay, we articulate and defend the very idea of affective knowledge and reveal aesthetic knowledge to be a species of the genus. We then show how the view resolves a thorny problem that has bedeviled aesthetic epistemologists: how to reconcile the seemingly direct character of aesthetic knowledge with the possibility of acquiring such knowledge from criticism. One learns from criticism, we argue, when it guides one’s engagement with an object so that one can appreciate it in virtue of those of its features that render it worthy of appreciation. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has defended the claim that the semantics of the indicative ‘if’ is given by the material conditional. Putative counterexamples can be handled by better understanding the role played in our assessment of indicatives by a fallible cognitive heuristic, called the Suppositional Procedure. Williamson’s Suppositional Conjecture has it that the Suppositional Procedure is humans’ primary way of prospectively assessing conditionals. This paper raises some doubts on the Suppositional Procedure and Conjecture.

The evolution of language represents one of the main complex systems investigated by different scientific domains and philosophy. The phylogeny of the trait is analyzable from different perspectives, which make evident its weaved and multilayered nature. In the present essay it is presented the dialogue between some researchers from different disciplines who propose original views regarding the analysis of the evolutionary perspective, in an inclusive and hybrid horizon. Secondly, it is exposed the theoretical frontier which identifies in language not only (...) a decisive feature in social contexts, but also an environment itself. (shrink)

This article argues, against the still-prevailing interpretation of Leonardo Bruni’s De militia – that it is a defense of civic militias against the mercenary system – for an alternative view: that it represents an attempt to reform communal knighthood in accordance with ancient Greek political theory and Roman historical models. It thus aimed to make the reform of contemporary knighthood into an aspect of the revival of antiquity.

This paper considers the nature of the changes that took place in logic teaching at the University of Oxford from the beginning of the sixteenth century, when students attended university lectures on Aristotle’s texts as well as studying short works dealing with specifically medieval developments, to the beginning of the eighteenth century when teaching was centred in the colleges, the medieval developments had largely disappeared, and manuals summarizing Aristotelian logic were used. The paper also considers the reasons for these changes, (...) including changes in English society, and the effect of humanism and the more scholarly Aristotelianism that it produced. (shrink)

Identity-Over-Time has been a favorite subject in the literature concerning Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas addresses this issue in many discussions, including especially the identity of material things and artifacts, the identity of the human soul after the corruption of body, the identity of the body of Christ in the three days from his death to his resurrection and the identity of the resurrected human body at the end of time. All these discussions have a point in common: they lead Aquinas to (...) raise the question of Identity-Over-Time with respect to things that fully exist in act, i.e., things that possess an identity of their own and change some of their parts or properties over time while continuing to be what they are. In this article, I investigate this topic from a different angle, considering the case of the trans-temporal identity of things that do not yet have an identity of their own or fully exist in act. The case at stake is that of the identity of the human embryo through the process of human generation. It is a puzzle that Aquinas seems to have some difficulties to solving, given his account of human embryogenesis as a process that alternates generations and corruptions of the subject. At the same time, though, Aquinas does not want to renounce the idea that the subject of generation must be numerically one and the same throughout all the process. In order to solve this puzzle, Aquinas seems to suggest distinguishing the identity of the subject from the identity of its matter and/or form. At given conditions, a thing can even change its matter and form while continuing to be the same thing in number. Specifically, the numerical identity of the subject of generation is justified by the identity entailed by the metaphysical notions of potency and act. (shrink)

Special issue: Philosophy and Mathematics at the Turn of the 18th Century: New Perspectives.

Luck egalitarianism provides a reason to object to conditionality in health incentive programmes in some cases when conditionality undermines political values such as solidarity or inclusiveness. This is the case with incentive programmes that aim to restrict access to essential healthcare services. Such programmes undermine solidarity. Yet, most people's lives are objectively worse, in one respect, in non-solidary societies, because solidarity contributes both instrumentally and directly to individuals' well-being. Because solidarity is non-excludable, undermining it will deprive both the prudent and (...) the imprudent citizens of its goods. Thereby, undermining solidarity can make prudent citizens worse off than they would have otherwise been, out of no fault or choice of their own, but rather as a result of somebody else's imprudent choice. This goes against the spirit of luck egalitarianism. Therefore (luck egalitarian) justice can require us to save the imprudent and avoid conditionality in access to essential healthcare services. (shrink)

Legal positivists maintain that the legality of a rule is fundamentally determined by social facts. Yet for much of legal history, ordinary officials used legal terminology in ways that seem inconsistent with positivism. Judges regularly cited, analyzed, and predicated their decisions on the ‘laws of justice’ which they claimed had universal legal import. This practice, though well-documented by historians, has received surprisingly little philosophical attention; I argue that it invites explanation from positivists. After taxonomizing the positivist’s explanatory options, I suggest (...) that the most viable option appeals to conceptual change: classical Romans, early modern Europeans, founding-era Americans were not using ‘law’ (or ‘lex’ or ‘jus’) to refer to the subject matter of contemporary legal philosophy. But the strategy is costly. It renders positivism’s truth surprisingly parochial. And it supplies new reasons for doubting positivist accounts of contemporary practices, including the treatment of moral principles in modern adjudication. (shrink)

With AI permeating our lives, there is widespread concern regarding the proper framework needed to morally assess and regulate it. This has given rise to many attempts to devise ethical guidelines that infuse guidance for both AI development and deployment. Our main concern is that, instead of a genuine ethical interest for AI, we are witnessing moral diplomacies resulting in moral bureaucracies battling for moral supremacy and political domination. After providing a short overview of what we term ‘ethics washing’ in (...) the AI industry, we analyze the 2021 UNESCO Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts (Category II) tasked with drafting the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and show why the term ‘moral diplomacy’ is better suited to explain what is happening in the field of the ethics of AI. Our paper ends with some general considerations regarding the future of the ethics of AI. (shrink)

In this article, I offer an account of what one of the short-term political aims of proponents of greater equality ought to be. I claim that the strengthening of reflective capacity—citizens’ ability to impose a temporary level of distance from their commitments, to consider alternatives to them, and to evaluate their origins and validity—ought to be one key aim of egalitarian politics under present political conditions. I then propose activist-led education programs as one desirable means to deliver this end of (...) strengthened reflective capacity. Where activist-led education provides plentiful informational resources and opportunities to practice deploying one’s reflective capacity, and also emphasizes and encourages intellectual humility, it seems well placed to help bring about this aim. Activist-led education programs are commonly subject to what I term the indoctrination worry, but I try to show that there are not good grounds for concluding in advance of further study that the delicate balancing of ends that permissible activist-led education requires is either categorically unachievable, or avoidable in the way these objectors often press. The argument thus provides presumptive grounds for considering the proliferation of suitably organized activist-led education programs an important component of a broader strategy of egalitarian social change. (shrink)

The many definitions of sophistry at the beginning of Plato’s Sophist have puzzled scholars just as much as they puzzled the dialogue’s main speakers: the Visitor from Elea and Theaetetus. The aim of this paper is to give an account of that puzzlement. This puzzlement, it is argued, stems not from a logical or epistemological problem, but from the metaphysical problem that, given the multiplicity of accounts, the interlocutors do not know what the sophist essentially is. It transpires that, in (...) order to properly account for this puzzle, one must jettison the traditional view of Plato’s method of division, on which divisions must be exclusive and mark out relations of essential predication. It is then shown on independent grounds that, although Platonic division in the Sophist must express predication relations and be transitive, it need not be dichotomous, exclusive, or express relations of essential predication. Once the requirements of exclusivity and essential predication are dropped, it is possible to make sense of the reasons that the Visitor from Elea and Theaetetus are puzzled. Moreover, with this in hand, it is possible to see Plato making an important methodological point in the dialogue: division on its own without any norms does not necessarily lead to the discovery of essences. (shrink)

Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one’s visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image pairs are important to the experimental testing of theories of consciousness. We review recent experimental research and conclude that filling-in involves brain activity with (...) relatively high integrated information (Phi) compared to veridical visual perceptions. We then present filled/non-filled pairs as an empirical challenge to the integrated information theory of consciousness, which predicts that phenomenologically identical experiences depend on brain processes with identical Phi. (shrink)

Kriegel described the problem of intentional inexistence as one of the ‘perennial problems of philosophy’, 307–340, 2007: 307). In the same paper, Kriegel alluded to a modal realist solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. However, Kriegel does not state by name who defends the kind of modal realist solution he has in mind. Kriegel also points out that even what he believes to be the strongest version of modal realism does not pass the ‘principle of representation’ and thus modal (...) realism is not an adequate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. In this paper, I respond to Kriegel by defending a modal realist solution that he did not consider in 2007, called ‘extended modal realism’. EMR is a version of modal realism where possible worlds are not completely isolated as they are under the Lewisian model. Rather, under EMR worlds are, in a way, spatiotemporally related. The fact EMR worlds are related allows EMR to sufficiently pass the principle of representation and thus can be deemed a legitimate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. I conclude that either EMR can pass the principle of representation in some cases or, and I think the more sensible option, we give up on the principle of representation altogether. (shrink)

Multiple Authors - please see paper attached. -/- AI systems have seen dramatic advancement in recent years, bringing many applications that pervade our everyday life. However, we are still mostly seeing instances of narrow AI: many of these recent developments are typically focused on a very limited set of competencies and goals, e.g., image interpretation, natural language processing, classification, prediction, and many others. We argue that a better study of the mechanisms that allow humans to have these capabilities can help (...) us understand how to imbue AI systems with these competencies. We focus especially on D. Kahneman’s theory of thinking fast and slow , and we propose a multi-agent AI architecture (called SOFAI, for SlOw and Fast AI) where incoming problems are solved by either system 1 (or "fast") agents (also called "solvers"), that react by exploiting only past experience, or by system 2 (or "slow") agents, that are deliberately activated when there is the need to reason and search for optimal solutions beyond what is expected from the system 1 agent. (shrink)

I review a tentative list of the examples of ethical exercises that have been proposed as Epictetan by contemporary commentators. Based on a minimal definition of the notion of ethical exercises, I suggest that some practices have been misidentified and propose some revisions to that repertoire.

The clash between Galileo and the Catholic Inquisition has been discussed, studied, and written about for many decades. The scientific, theological, political, and social implications have all been carefully analysed and appreciated in all their interpretative fruitfulness. The relatively recent trend in this kind of scholarship however seems to have underestimated the fact that Galileo in this debate, as in his earlier debates, showed a particular style marked by overconfidence. If we keep in mind the Lakatosian account of scientific development, (...) it is of course perfectly understandable that scientists at times stick to their convictions by producing auxiliary hypotheses as buffers against contrary evidence. And elements of this are detectable in the arguments of both Galileo and his opponents. But one still needs to ask: To what extent did Galileo depend on auxiliary hypotheses? How insecure did they render his position? And how ad hoc were they? These are important questions because Galileo’s particular way of dealing with auxiliary hypotheses can throw light on the broader question of when and how auxiliary hypotheses are needed within scientific practice in general. It can even indicate some way of conceiving degrees of ad hocness. In this paper, I explore this issue by comparing two important debates in which Galileo was involved: one about the nature of water and buoyancy, the other about cosmology. I revisit not only the scientific content of these debates but also the cultural context in which they took place, especially their dependence on patronage and their theological repercussions. The results indicate that scholarship on Galileo can still be useful in clarifying currently relevant aspects of scientific practice, and is thus still far from its expiry date. (shrink)

Many people published UNBELIEVABLE similar ideas to my ideas, long time after I published my ideas at Synthese (USA, 2005) and Springer (2015) and posted FREE on different webpages!!!!

In order to obtain a complete description and understanding of the whole of reality and to include a true description of what a human being is and what the totality of the human experience is, one must integrate science with a particular theology. However, which theology or religion should we use? As done in science, one must choose the theology that has the highest explanatory power—namely, by applying the principle of parsimony, Occam’s razor.

Some of the most significant policy responses to cases of fraudulent and questionable conduct by scientists have been to strengthen professionalism among scientists, whether by codes of conduct, integrity boards, or mandatory research integrity training programs. Yet there has been little systematic discussion about what professionalism in scientific research should mean. In this paper I draw on the sociology of the professions and on data comparing codes of conduct in science to those in the professions, in order to examine what (...) precisely the model of professionalism implies for scientific research. I argue that professionalism, more than any other single organizational logic, is appropriate for scientific research, and that codes of conduct for scientists should strengthen statements concerning scientific autonomy and competence, as well as the scientific service ideal. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites — which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, (...) and understanding to individuals with AN — help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccination of children over 12 has begun in various high-income countries with regulatory approval and general public support, but largely without careful ethical consideration. This trend is expected to extend to other COVID-19 vaccines and lower ages as clinical trials progress. This paper provides an ethical analysis of COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children. Specifically, we argue that it is currently unclear whether routine COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children is ethically justified in most contexts, given the minimal direct benefit that (...) COVID-19 vaccination provides to children, the potential for rare risks to outweigh these benefits and undermine vaccine confidence, and substantial evidence that COVID-19 vaccination confers adequate protection to risk groups, such as older adults, without the need to vaccinate children. We conclude that child COVID-19 vaccination in wealthy communities before adults in poor communities worldwide is ethically unacceptable and consider how policy deliberations might evolve in light of future developments. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. (...) In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding, I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding, I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn. (shrink)

A considerable literature has emerged around the idea of using ‘personal responsibility’ as an allocation criterion in healthcare distribution, where a person's being suitably responsible for their health needs may justify additional conditions on receiving healthcare, and perhaps even limiting access entirely, sometimes known as ‘responsibilisation’. This discussion focuses most prominently, but not exclusively, on ‘luck egalitarianism’, the view that deviations from equality are justified only by suitably free choices. A superficially separate issue in distributive justice concerns the two–way relationship (...) between health and other social goods: deficits in health typically undermine one's abilities to secure advantage in other areas, which in turn often have further negative effects on health. This paper outlines the degree to which this latter relationship between health and other social goods exacerbates an existing problem for proponents of responsibilisation (the ‘harshness objection’) in ways that standard responses to this objection cannot address. Placing significant conditions on healthcare access because of a person's prior responsibility risks trapping them in, or worsening, negative cycles where poor health and associated lack of opportunity reinforce one another, making further poor yet ultimately responsible choices more likely. It ends by considering three possible solutions to this problem. (shrink)

Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of ‘articulating (...) an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

In Deep Medicine, Eric Topol argues that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare will lead to a dramatic shift in the culture and practice of medicine. Topol claims that, rather than replacing physicians, AI could function alongside of them in order to allow them to devote more of their time to face-to-face patient care. Unfortunately, these high hopes for AI-enhanced medicine fail to appreciate a number of factors that, we believe, suggest a radically different picture for the future (...) of healthcare. Far from facilitating a return to “the golden age of doctoring”, the role of economic and institutional considerations in determining how medical AI will be used mean that it is likely to further erode therapeutic relationships and threaten professional and patient satisfaction. (shrink)

Adolescents are routinely treated differently to adults, even when they possess similar capacities. In this article, we explore the justification for one case of differential treatment of adolescents. We attempt to make philosophical sense of the concurrent consents doctrine in law: adolescents found to have decision-making capacity have the power to consent to—and thereby, all else being equal, permit—their own medical treatment, but they lack the power always to refuse treatment and so render it impermissible. Other parties, that is, individuals (...) who exercise parental responsibility or a court, retain the authority to consent on an adolescent’s behalf. We explore four defences of the doctrine. We reject two attempts to defend the asymmetry in the power to consent to and refuse medical treatment by reference to transitional paternalism. We then consider and reject a stage of life justification. Finally, we articulate a justification based on the distinctiveness of adolescent well-being. (shrink)

India, despite being the world's largest vaccine manufacturer is now struggling with various unprecedented social, legal, moral issues with the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination program for 1.3 billion people, the largest democracy in the world. With three major vaccines including Covishield, homemade vaccine Covaxin, and Russia's Sputnik V, India is still facing acute scarcity of vaccines and raw material supply. This is not only unfortunate but also reveals the ethically-triggered facts about the imbalanced healthcare system between public and private sectors, ineffective (...) inequitable healthcare policies, unaccountable data reports that raise mistrust and confusion, and a deeper concern about global unfair distribution. In this paper, I have briefly discussed some unparalleled ethical issues raised from the vaccination program of India. (shrink)

Bell’s theorem has fascinated physicists and philosophers since his 1964 paper, which was written in response to the 1935 paper of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Bell’s theorem and its many extensions have led to the claim that quantum mechanics and by inference nature herself are nonlocal in the sense that a measurement on a system by an observer at one location has an immediate effect on a distant entangled system. Einstein was repulsed by such “spooky action at a distance” and (...) was led to question whether quantum mechanics could provide a complete description of physical reality. In this paper I argue that quantum mechanics does not require spooky action at a distance of any kind and yet it is entirely reasonable to question the assumption that quantum mechanics can provide a complete description of physical reality. The magic of entangled quantum states has little to do with entanglement and everything to do with superposition, a property of all quantum systems and a foundational tenet of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Bayesians have a well-developed account of how you should change your credences when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they have a range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of new possibilities; that is, when your awareness grows. In this paper, I consider each of the arguments for the (...) Bayesian's account of how respond to evidence, and I ask whether they can generate a Bayesian account of how to respond to awareness growth. I argue that, with one exception, they can't. I conclude that our credal response to awareness growth is considerably less rigorously constrained than our credal response to new evidence. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an expansion of one of the well-known classical inventory management models, which is the static model of inventory management without a deficit and for a single substance, based on the neutrosophic logic, where we provide through this study a basis for dealing with all data, whether specific or undefined in the field of inventory management, as it provides safe environment to manage inventory without running into deficit , and give us an approximate ideal volume of (...) inventory. Since the ideal size is affected by the rate of demand for inventory, we present in this paper a study of the rate of demand for inventory when it is not precisely refined, and we find that the indeterminate values of the demand rate cannot be ignored, because they actually affect determining the ideal size of inventory and calculating its costs, thus affecting on the efficiency of the facility and achieve great profits for it. (shrink)

This paper considers why obtaining and sustaining a good sexual life tends to be so challenging and why the temptation to settle for a bad one can be so alluring. We engage these questions by cultivating ideas found in the traditions of feminist philosophy and the philosophy of sex and love in dialogue with the works of two unlikely, canonical bedfellows—Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. We propose that some sources of these challenges and temptations are patterned and manifold in that (...) they involve trying to transform, develop, integrate certain unruly emotional structures in oneself, including together with others. Other equally patterned and unruly sources track inherited oppressive or oppressed behaviors and feelings that make emotionally healthy, morally responsible realizations of sexual ways and being more difficult for all parties involved. In contrast to these patterned challenges, some difficulties that face us stem from the fact that humans are genuinely different from one another and evolving—individually, jointly, and collectively—in their sexual needs and wants. (shrink)

In this first part of a 2-part survey of Aristotle's epistemology, I present an overview of the features Aristotle attributes to gnōsis (cognition or knowledge), a term Aristotle applies to true cognitive states, whether rational or non-rational. Gnōsis is being in contact with reality. How this is done differs depending on the domain but for Aristotle all the cases involve taking on the form of the object known, which is what makes it factive. I present perception and experience (empeiria) and (...) the role they play in acquiring knowledge. I then cover Aristotle's understanding of belief (hupolēpsis) and opinion (doxa) and lay out why he thinks they are rational activities, but not excellences. I then provide an overview of current scholarly views on nous (comprehension or understanding) and epistēmē (scientific knowledge). (shrink)

It is often said that the world is explained by laws of nature together with initial conditions. But does that mean initial conditions don’t require further explanation? And does the explanatory role played by initial conditions entail or require that time has a preferred direction? This chapter looks at the use of the ‘initialness defence’ in physics, the idea that initial conditions are intrinsically special in that they don’t require further explanation, unlike the state of the world at other times. (...) Such defences commonly assume a primitive directionality of time to distinguish between initial and final conditions. Using the case study of the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and the so-called ‘past hypothesis’ — the hypothesis that the early universe was in a state of very low entropy —, I outline and support a deflationary account of the initialness defence that does not pre- suppose a basic directionality of time, and argue that there is a relevant explanatory asymmetry between initial conditions and the state of systems at other times only if certain causal conditions are satisfied. Hence, the initialness defence is available to those who reject a fundamental direction of time. (shrink)

The scientific community takes for granted a view of science that may be called standard empiricism. This holds that the basic intellectual aim of science is truth, nothing being presupposed about the truth, the basic method being to assess theories with respect to evidence. A basic tenet of the view is that science must not accept any thesis about the world as a part of scientific knowledge independent of evidence, let alone in violation of evidence. But physics only accepts unified (...) theories, and persistently rejects infinitely many ad hoc rivals that fit the phenomena even better. In persistently rejecting these infinitely many empirically more successful rival theories, physics thereby makes a substantial assumption about the universe – it is such that all ad hoc theories are false – an assumption that is accepted implicitly independently of evidence, even in a sense against the evidence. That contradicts standard empiricism. The scientific community needs to adopt a new conception of science that represents the assumption of physics as a hierarchy of assumptions, thus facilitating the improvement of the assumption that is made, as science proceeds. (shrink)

The late Robert Veatch, one of the United States’ founders of bioethics, never tired of reminding us that the paradigm-shifting contribution that bioethics made to patient care was to liberate patients out of the hands of doctors, who were traditionally seen to know best, even when they decidedly did not know best. It seems to us that with the advent of COVID-19, health policy has come full-circle on this. COVID-19 gave rise to a large number of purportedly “ethical” guidance documents (...) aiming to assist health care providers and practitioners with responding to the ethical challenges that might arise in their response to the pandemic. Ethics has two primary functions: provide clear action guidance, and provide clear action justification. The documents in question arguably reflect the ultimate policy triumph of bioethical “principlism”, and, perhaps surprisingly, as a corollary, the ultimate triumph of “doctor-knows-best”. (shrink)

Inspired by Cantor's Theorem (CT), orthodoxy takes infinities to come in different sizes. The orthodox view has had enormous influence in mathematics, philosophy, and science. We will defend the contrary view---Countablism---according to which, necessarily, every infinite collection (set or plurality) is countable. We first argue that the potentialist or modal strategy for treating Russell's Paradox, first proposed by Parsons (2000) and developed by Linnebo (2010, 2013) and Linnebo and Shapiro (2019), should also be applied to CT, in a way that (...) vindicates Countabilism. Our discussion dovetails with recent independently developed treatments of CT in Meadows (2015), Pruss (2020), and Scambler (2021), aimed at establishing the mathematical viability, and therefore epistemic possibility, of Countabilism. Unlike these authors, our goal isn't to vindicate the mathematical underpinnings of Countabilism. Rather, we aim to argue that, given that Countabilism is mathematically viable, Countabilism should moreover be regarded as true. After clarifying the modal content of Countabilism, we canvas some of Countabilism's many positive implications, including that Countabilism provides the best account of the pervasive independence phenomena in set theory, and that Countabilism has the power to defuse several persistent puzzles and paradoxes found in physics and metaphysics. We conclude that in light of its theoretical and explanatory advantages, Countabilism is more likely true than not. (shrink)

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive (...) ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper argues that the fundamental problem of cognitive neuroscience arises from the neuronal description of the brain and the phenomenal description of the conscious mind. In general philosophers agree that no functional approach can explain phenomenal consciousness; some even think that science is forever unable to explain the qualitative character of our experiences. In order to overcome these challenges, I propose a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the brain according to which brain states are characterized by intrinsic (...) properties, whereas the brain under the causal influence of an organism’s environment acquires extrinsic properties. These extrinsic properties may account for both phenomenal experiences as well as our thoughts about these experiences. At the end I discuss this proposal viability in relation to higher-order theories. (shrink)

William Whewell’s 19th century philosophy of science is sometimes glossed over as a footnote to Kant. There is however a key feature of Whewell’s account worth noting. This is his appeal to Aristotle’s form/matter hylomorphism as a metaphor to explain how mind and world merge in successful scientific inquiry. Whewell’s hylomorphism suggests a middle way between rationalism and empiricism reminiscent of experience pragmatists like Steven Levine’s view that mind and world are entwined in experience. I argue however that Levine does (...) not adequately explain exactly how mind and world entwine. He could nonetheless do so if he appealed to Whewell’s hylomorphic metaphor. We may prefer a reductive metaphysical explanation, but I suggest that pragmatists only have recourse to metaphor in this case. Both reductive and metaphorical explanations can enjoy great explanatory power if they exhibit a suitable measure of what I will call sematic distance. Semantic distance measures how close or how far apart explanandum and explanans are from each other in meaning. Metaphorical explanation as evident in Whewell’s hylomorphism and as detailed via the notion of semantic distance presents a valuable new explanatory tool to those who hold that mind and world are entwined sans recourse to metaphysics. (shrink)

Bayesian models of legal arguments generally aim to produce a single integrated model, combining each of the legal arguments under consideration. This combined approach implicitly assumes that variables and their relationships can be represented without any contradiction or misalignment, and in a way that makes sense with respect to the competing argument narratives. This paper describes a novel approach to compare and ‘average’ Bayesian models of legal arguments that have been built independently and with no attempt to make them consistent (...) in terms of variables, causal assumptions or parameterization. The approach involves assessing whether competing models of legal arguments are explained or predict facts uncovered before or during the trial process. Those models that are more heavily disconfirmed by the facts are given lower weight, as model plausibility measures, in the Bayesian model comparison and averaging framework adopted. In this way a plurality of arguments is allowed yet a single judgement based on all arguments is possible and rational. (shrink)

The relationship between the phenomenology of imagination and the phenomenology of memory is an interestingly complicated one. On the one hand, there seem to be important similarities between the two, and there are even occasions in which we mistake an imagining for a memory or vice versa. On the other hand, there seem to be important differences between the two, and we can typically tell them apart. This paper explores various attempts to delineate a phenomenological marker differentiating imagination and memory, (...) with a special focus on two proposed markers that have generated considerable philosophical discussion: the feeling of pastness and the feeling of familiarity. As we will find, neither of them proves to be up to the task at hand. However, by way of a deeper exploration of the feeling of familiarity, we are able to tease out some important morals for efforts to differentiate imagination and memory on phenomenological grounds and, more generally, for efforts to engage in a descriptive phenomenological enterprise. (shrink)

The vast advances in biometrics over the past several decades has brought with it a host of pressing concerns. Philosophical scrutiny has already been devoted to many of the relevant ethical and political issues, especially ones arising from matters of privacy, bias, and security in data collection. But philosophers have devoted surprisingly little attention to the relevant metaphysical issues, in particular, ones concerning matters of personal identity. This paper aims to take some initial steps in correcting this oversight. After discussing (...) the philosophical problem of personal identity, I explore the ways in which the notion of biometric identity connects with, or fails to connect with, the philosophical notion of personal identity. Though there may be some good reasons to use biometric identity to track personal identity, I argue that biometric identity is not the same thing as personal identity and thus that biometrics researchers should stop talking as if it were. (shrink)

Which country, politician, or policy is more of a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic death toll? Which of the two factories causally contributed more to the pollution of the nearby river? A wide-ranging portion of our everyday thought and talk, and attitudes rely on a graded notion of causation. However, it is sometimes highlighted that on most contemporary accounts, causation is on-off. Some philosophers further question the legitimacy of talk of degrees of causation and suggest that we avoid it. Some (...) hold that the notion of degrees of causation is an illusion. In this paper, I’ll argue that causation does come in degrees. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill advocated for increased interactions between individuals of dissenting opinions for the reason that it would improve society. Whether Mill and similar arguments that advocate for opinion diversity are valid depends on background assumptions about the psychology and sociality of individuals. The field of opinion dynamics is a burgeoning testing ground for how different combinations of sociological and psychological facts contribute to phenomena that affect opinion diversity, such as polarization. This paper applies some recent results from the opinion (...) dynamics literature to assess the impacts of the Millian suggestion. The goal is to understand how the scope of the validity of Mill-style arguments depends on plausible assumptions that can be formalized using agent-based models, a common modeling approach in opinion dynamics. The most salient insight is that homophily (increased interactions between like-minded individuals) does not sufficiently explain decreased opinion diversity. Hence, decreasing homophily by increasing interactions between individuals of dissenting opinions is not the simple solution that a Millian-style argument may advocate. (shrink)

This article argues that capital flight of real investment presents governments with a quadrilemma. First, governments can tailor their policies to attract investors – but this is incompatible with a whole range of alternative policy choices. Second, they can simply accept capital flight – but this is incompatible with a robust capital stock and tax base. Third, they can harmonize its taxes and regulations with other states – but this is incompatible with international independence. Fourth, they can impose capital controls (...) – but this is incompatible with international capital mobility. These incompatibilities make up four different goals, the value of which are described. Strategies may be mixed, but the pursuit of any three goals must always come at the expense of the fourth. (shrink)

This piece explores the meaning of the following quote from Charles Peirce (1902), ". . . the main reason logic is unsettled is that thirteen different opinions are current as to the true aim of the science. Now this is not a logical difficulty, but an ethical difficulty; for ethics is the science of aims. Secondly, it is true that ethics has been, and always must be, a theatre of discussion for the reason that its study consists in the gradual (...) development of a distinct recognition of a satisfactory aim. It is a science of subtleties, no doubt; but it is not logic, but the development of the ideal, which really creates and resolves the problems of ethics.". (shrink)

Is consciousness intrinsically valuable? Some theorists favor the positive view, according to which consciousness itself accrues intrinsic value, independent of the particular kind of experience instantiated. In contrast, I favor the neutral view, according to which consciousness is neither intrinsically valuable nor disvaluable. The primary purpose of this paper is to clarify what is at stake when we ask whether consciousness is intrinsically valuable, to carve out the theoretical space, and to evaluate the question rigorously. Along the way, I also (...) show why the neutral view is attractive and why certain arguments for the positive view do not work. (shrink)

AI-supported methods for identifying and combating disinformation are progressing in their development and application. However, these methods face a litany of epistemic and ethical challenges. These include (1) robustly defining disinformation, (2) reliably classifying data according to this definition, and (3) navigating ethical risks in the deployment of countermeasures, which involve a mixture of harms and benefits. This paper seeks to expose and offer preliminary analysis of these challenges.

Biological sexes (male, female, hermaphrodite) are defined by different gametic strategies for reproduction. Sexes are regions of phenotypic space which implement those gametic reproductive strategies. Individual organisms pass in and out of these regions – sexes - one or more times during their lives. Importantly, sexes are life-history stages rather than applying to organisms over their entire lifespan. This fact has been obscured by concentrating on humans, and ignoring species which regularly change sex, as well as those with non-genetic or (...) facultatively genetic sex determination systems. But the general point applies equally to humans. Assigning sexes to pre-reproductive life history stages involves ‘prospective narration’ – classifying the present in terms of its anticipated future. Assigning sexes to adult stages of non-reproductive castes or non-reproductive individuals is a complex matter whose biological meaning differs from case to case. The chromosomal and phenotypic ‘definitions’ of biological sex that are contested in philosophical discussions of sex are actually operational definitions which track gametic sex more or less effectively in some species or group of species. Neither ‘definition’ can be stated for species in general except by defining them in terms of gametic sex. The gametic definition of sex also features in widely accepted models which explain why two biological sexes – either in separate individuals or combined in hermaphroditic individuals - are almost universal in multicellular species. Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women. (shrink)

What is the quantum state of the universe? Although there have been several interesting suggestions, the question remains open. In this paper, I consider a natural choice for the universal quantum state arising from the Past Hypothesis, a boundary condition that accounts for the time-asymmetry of the universe. The natural choice is given not by a wave function but by a density matrix. I begin by classifying quantum theories into two types: theories with a fundamental wave function and theories with (...) a fundamental density matrix. The Past Hypothesis is compatible with infinitely many initial wave functions, none of which seems to be particularly natural. However, once we turn to density matrices, the Past Hypothesis provides a natural choice---the normalized projection onto the Past Hypothesis subspace in the Hilbert space. Nevertheless, the two types of theories can be empirically equivalent. To provide a concrete understanding of the empirical equivalence, I provide a novel subsystem analysis in the context of Bohmian theories. Given the empirical equivalence, it seems empirically underdetermined whether the universe is in a pure state or a mixed state. Finally, I discuss some theoretical payoffs of the density-matrix theories and present some open problems for future research. (Bibliographic note: the thesis was submitted for the Master of Science in mathematics at Rutgers University.). (shrink)

My objective of this paper is to suggest and workout a more credible form of the Principle of Beneficence from the common essential elements of the three major ethical theories (Deontology, Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics) that will try to overcome the over-demanding objection of Utilitarianism and the rigorism of Kant’s Deontology. After analyzing these three moral systems, I find that beneficence lies within the very essence of humanity. Human beings are superior to other creatures in the world due to rationality (...) and humanity. From the humanitarian ground, a common goodness lies within every human. Beneficence, as a moral principle, is derived from this inner humanity of every individual. Despite their initial differences, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics recognize this fundamental humanitarian disposition of doing good for all as a part of being a morally better person. The principle of beneficence as I suggest, is different from its consequential utilitarian notion suggested by Mill. This version of beneficence is more credible as it does not impose excessive demands upon an individual to develop any maximum beneficial outcome following utilitarian calculation of beneficence over cost, and it also strives to overcome the rigorous duty-based theory of Kantian deontology by appealing to the fundamental virtue of humanity. Finally, the credibility of this form of beneficence comes from the underlying transcendental humanism which is the chief feature of Indian tradition. (shrink)

The paper takes up Bell's “Everett theory” and develops it further. The resulting theory is about the system of all particles in the universe, each located in ordinary, 3-dimensional space. This many-particle system as a whole performs random jumps through 3N-dimensional configuration space – hence “Tychistic Bohmian Mechanics”. The distribution of its spontaneous localisations in configuration space is given by the Born Rule probability measure for the universal wavefunction. Contra Bell, the theory is argued to satisfy the minimal desiderata for (...) a Bohmian theory within the Primitive Ontology framework. TBM's formalism is that of ordinary Bohmian Mechanics, without the postulate of continuous particle trajectories and their deterministic dynamics. This “rump formalism” receives, however, a different interpretation. We defend TBM as an empirically adequate and coherent quantum theory. Objections voiced by Bell and Maudlin are rebutted. The “for all practical purposes”-classical, Everettian worlds exist sequentially in TBM. In a temporally coarse-grained sense, they quasi-persist. By contrast, the individual particles themselves cease to persist. (shrink)

This thesis develops a detailed account of the emergence of for all practical purposes continuous, quasi-classical world histories from the discontinuous, stochastic micro dynamics of Minimal Bohmian Mechanics (MBM). MBM is a non-relativistic quantum theory. It results from excising the guiding equation from standard Bohmian Mechanics (BM) and reinterpreting the quantum equilibrium hypothesis as a stochastic guidance law for the random actualization of configurations of Bohmian particles. On MBM, there are no continuous trajectories linking up individual configurations. Instead, individual configurations (...) are actualized independently of each other, carving out the decoherence-induced branching structure of the universal wave function. Yet, by contrast to the Everett interpretation, branches of the universal wave function are not actualized in parallel, i.e. all at the same time. Rather, world branches, on MBM, are actualized sequentially. -/- For an introduction to MBM, the transition from BM to MBM is described, and their empirical equivalence is established. I present the conditions under which MBM can be classified as a primitive ontology (PO) theory, regarded as crucial for the acceptance of a theory as Bohmian by many proponents of BM. While rendering MBM compatible with the PO approach, it must not fall prey to the problem of communication, arising from the two-space reading of BM. -/- The issue of temporal solipsism, identified by Bell as a serious problem for his “Everett (?) theory” – the historic predecessor of MBM – is discussed. I argue that Barbour’s time capsule approach does not provide a satisfactory solution. In particular, his adopting a more than minimal psychophysical parallelism between brain processes and experience of macroscopic change is argued to be reasonable in light of our current best neuroscience, yet problematic for theories relying solely on time capsules, understood as highly structured, individual, internally static configurations. As a solution, I introduce worlds, and world histories, as key concepts in providing a link between MBM’s micro dynamics and macroscopic phenomena. Worlds, other than time capsules, are coarse-grained regions in phase- or configuration space, defined as sets of possible micro states satisfying a relation of sufficient similarity from a macroscopic perspective, with respect to a given micro state. Hence, worlds may overlap. -/- I argue that worlds thus construed are a reasonable option for replacing the disjoint macro regions of phase space, resulting from the usual way of partitioning phase space in the standard framework of Boltzmannian statistical mechanics. This move solves the issue of discontinuous change of macro variables upon the micro state crossing the boundary between different macro regions. -/- I adapt this move for MBM’s discontinuous micro dynamics in configuration space. Issues revolving around the microscopic-macroscopic distinction, particle identity, impenetrability and haecceity in light of the desideratum of particle number conservation, etc., are discussed. I provide a detailed explanation of how overlapping worlds in MBM form world histories, thereby linking up macroscopically distinct worlds. Thus, the problem of temporal solipsism is resolved in a way that is compatible with a more than minimal psychophysical parallelism. (shrink)

Since the noun phrase `artificial intelligence' (AI) was coined, it has been debated whether humans are able to create intelligence using technology. We shed new light on this question from the point of view of themodynamics and mathematics. First, we define what it is to be an agent (device) that could be the bearer of AI. Then we show that the mainstream definitions of `intelligence' proposed by Hutter and others and still accepted by the AI community are too weak even (...) to capture what is involved when we ascribe intelligence to an insect. We then summarise the highly useful definition of basic (arthropod) intelligence proposed by Rodney Brooks, and we identify the properties that an AI agent would need to possess in order to be the bearer of intelligence by this definition. Finally, we show that, from the perspective of the disciplines needed to create such an agent, namely mathematics and physics, these properties are realisable by neither implicit nor explicit mathematical design nor by setting up an environment in which an AI could evolve spontaneously. (shrink)

In this chapter, we start by spelling out three important features that distinguish expressives—utterances that express emotions and other affects—from descriptives, including those that describe emotions (Section 1). Drawing on recent insights from the philosophy of emotion and value (2), we show how these three features derive from the nature of affects, concentrating on emotions (3). We then spell out how theories of non-natural meaning and communication in the philosophy of language allow claims that expressives inherit their meaning from specificities (...) of emotions—namely, from being felt, evaluative attitudes toward propositional or non-propositional contents (4). (shrink)

According to some, the current political fracture is best described as political polariza-tion – where extremism and political separation infest an entire whole population. Po-litical polarization accounts often point to the psychological phenomenon of belief po-larization – where being in a like-minded groups tends to boost confidence. The politi-cal polarization story is an essentially symmetrical one, where both sides are subject to the same basic dividing forces and cognitive biases, and are approximately as blame-worthy. On a very different account, what's (...) going on is best described propaganda – where a discrete set of bad actors have manipulated some part of the media environ-ment. The propaganda story is usually told as a highly asymmetrical story, where only some media consumers are under the spell of the propagandists. Which is right? I con-sider two analyses of the 2016 American election, and suggest that the propaganda ac-count has better empirical support. I also offer a diagnosis of the appeal of the polari-zation story. Those who accept a polarization account are often political centrists, who accuse those at the political extremes of motivated reasoning – of believing what they find comfortable. Such centrists also tend to treat political extremism as the product of the irrational belief polarization, arising from living in like-minded groups. But, I argue, these arguments are too quick. First, we can’t dismiss a group as irrational merely be-cause they are likeminded. The existence of like-minded group can be explained in terms of irrational belief polarization, but it can also be explained by rational conver-gence on the truth. Second, belief polarization is not always irrational, such as when its emotional effects are used to repair impaired self-confidence. Third, political centrists are also subject to similar debunking argument. When we accept a polarization ac-count, we get to feel the comfort of being “above it all”. Political centrists are just as plausibly subject to the irrational effects of living in like-minded groups. Belief polariza-tion isn’t just for extremists. (shrink)

As the aim of the responsible robotics initiative is to ensure that responsible practices are inculcated within each stage of design, development and use, this impetus is undergirded by the alignment of ethical and legal considerations towards socially beneficial ends. While every effort should be expended to ensure that issues of responsibility are addressed at each stage of technological progression, irresponsibility is inherent within the nature of robotics technologies from a theoretical perspective that threatens to thwart the endeavour. This is (...) because the concept of responsibility, despite being treated as such, is not monolithic: rather this seemingly unified concept consists of converging and confluent concepts that shape the idea of what we colloquially call responsibility. From a different perspective, robotics will be simultaneously responsible and irresponsible depending on the particular concept of responsibility that is foregrounded: an observation that cuts against the grain of the drive towards responsible robotics. This problem is further compounded by responsible design and development as contrasted to responsible use. From a different perspective, the difficulty in defining the concept of responsibility in robotics is because human responsibility is the main frame of reference. Robotic systems are increasingly expected to achieve the human-level performance, including the capacities associated with responsibility and other criteria which are necessary to act responsibly. This subsists within a larger phenomenon where the difference between humans and non-humans, be it animals or artificial systems, appears to be increasingly blurred, thereby disrupting orthodox understandings of responsibility. This paper seeks to supplement the responsible robotics impulse by proposing a complementary set of human rights directed specifically against the harms arising from robotic and artificial intelligence technologies. The relationship between responsibilities of the agent and the rights of the patient suggest that a rights regime is the other side of responsibility coin. The major distinction of this approach is to invert the power relationship: while human agents are perceived to control robotic patients, the prospect for this to become reversed is beginning. As robotic technologies become ever more sophisticated, and even genuinely complex, asserting human rights directly against robotic harms become increasingly important. Such an approach includes not only developing human rights that ‘protect’ humans but also ‘strengthen’ people against the challenges introduced by robotics and AI [This distinction parallels Berlin’s negative and positive concepts of liberty ], by emphasising the social and reflective character of the notion of humanness as well as the difference between the human and nonhuman. This will allow using the human frame of reference as constitutive of, rather than only subject to, the robotic and AI technologies, where it is human and not technology characteristics that shape the human rights framework in the first place. (shrink)

Relevant logics infamously have the property that they only validate a conditional when some propositional variable is shared between its antecedent and consequent. This property has been strengthened in a variety of ways over the last half-century. Two of the more famous of these strengthenings are the strong variable sharing property and the depth relevance property. In this paper I demonstrate that an appropriate class of relevant logics has a property that might naturally be characterized as the supremum of these (...) two properties. I also show how to use this fact to demonstrate that these logics seem to be constructive in previously unknown ways. (shrink)

Logic is about reasoning, or so the story goes. This thesis looks at the concept of logic, what it is, and what claims of correctness of logics amount to. The concept of logic is not a settled matter, and has not been throughout the history of it as a notion. Tools from conceptual analysis aid in this historical venture. Once the unsettledness of logic is established we see the repercussions in current debates in the philosophy of logic. Much of the (...) battle over the ‘one true logic’ is conceptually talking past each other. The theory of logics-as-formalizations is presented as a conceptually open theory of logic which is Carnapian in flavour and grounding. Rudolf Carnap’s notions surrounding ‘external’ and ‘pseudo-questions’ about linguistic frameworks apply to formalizations, thus logics, as well. An account of what formalizations are, a more structured sub-set of modelling, is given to ground the claim that logics are formalizations. Finally, a novel account of correctness, the COFE framework, is developed which allows the notions of logical monism, pluralism and nihilism to be more precisely formulated than they currently are in the discourse. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame’s value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame’s other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation View’. However The Social Evaluation View faces the opposite challenge of convincingly accommodating shame’s ‘value-oriented’ dimension. After rejecting one attempt to chart (...) a middle course between these extremes, I argue that progress can be made if we reject the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others. Instead, I outline an account which treats shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection and which elucidates the property of shamefulness in terms of merited avoidance (or rejection). (shrink)

The science of mind wandering has rapidly expanded over the past 20 years. During this boom, mind wandering researchers have relied on self-report methods, where participants rate whether their minds were wandering. This is not an historical quirk. Rather, we argue that self-report is indispensable for researchers who study passive phenomena like mind wandering. We consider purportedly “objective” methods that measure mind wandering with eye tracking and machine learning. These measures are validated in terms of how well they predict self-reports, (...) which means that purportedly objective measures of mind wandering retain a subjective core. Mind wandering science cannot break from the cycle of self-report. Skeptics about self-report might conclude that mind wandering science has methodological foundations of sand. We take a rather more optimistic view. We present empirical and philosophical reasons to be confident in self-reports about mind wandering. Empirically, these self-reports are remarkably consistent in their contents and behavioral and neural correlates. Philosophically, self-reports are consistent with our best theories about the function of mind wandering. We argue that this triangulation gives us reason to trust both theory and method. (shrink)

A conviction had by many Christians over many centuries is that natural language is inadequate for describing God. This is the doctrine of divine ineffability. Apophaticism understands divine ineffability as it being justified or proper to negate statements that describe God. This paper develops and defends a version of apophaticism in which the negation involved is metalinguistic. The interest of this metalinguistic apophaticism is two-fold. First, it provides a philosophical model of historical apophaticisms that shows their rational coherence. Second, metalinguistic (...) apophaticism enables a minimal understanding of ineffability that is independently plausible given its minor commitments. (shrink)

What is the connection between justification and the kind of consequence relations that are studied by logic? In this essay, I shall try to provide an answer, by proposing a general conception of the kind of inference that counts as justified or rational.

Demography is typically defined as the study of human populations and the changes in their quantity associated with migration, fertility, and mortality. The term demography comes from Greek word and means “describing people.” Thus, this discipline deals with the characteristics of the population, taking into account features such as, sex ratio, age structure, composition, spatial distribution, and population density. In addition, sometimes a distinction is made between “formal demography” or “demographic analysis,” which includes the statistical analysis of population parameters and (...) their dynamics, and “population studies,” that is, the analysis of the causes and effects of changes in the structure of the population in a broader context and in connection with other phenomena and processes. (shrink)

Prior's puzzle is a puzzle about the substitution of certain putatively synonymous or coreferential expressions in sentences. Prior's puzzle is important, because a satisfactory solution to it should constitute a crucial part of an adequate semantic theory for both proposition-embedding expressions and attitudinal verbs. I argue that two recent solutions to this puzzle are unsatisfactory. They either focus on the meaning of attitudinal verbs or content nouns. I propose a solution relying on a recent analysis of that-clauses in linguistics. Our (...) solution is superior, as it not only avoids the problems faced by previous solutions, but it also brings developments in linguistics in line to solve an old puzzle in philosophy. (shrink)

The three main types of policies for addressing climate change are command and control regulation, carbon taxes (or price instruments), and cap and trade (or quantity instruments). The first question in the ethics of carbon pricing is whether the latter two (price and quantity instruments) are preferable to command and control regulation. The second question is, if so, how should we evaluate the relative merits of price and quantity instruments. I canvass relevant arguments to explain different ways of addressing these (...) important policy questions, suggesting that carbon pricing is preferable to command and control regulation, and that price instruments have the theoretical edge over quantity instruments. (shrink)

When evolutionary explanation is transferred from its normal habitat of biology to the realm of human social, cultural, and moral concerns, a problem is often neglected. After examining arguments for and against Social Darwinism, this paper identifies this problem and proceeds by exploring the possibility of a middle-ground position according to which Social Darwinism would be enough for explaining some aspects of moral and social behaviour but not enough for explaining all aspects. The investigation indicates that this middle-ground position is (...) not viable because intentional content burdens evolutionary ethics with fundamental problems, problems that need to be resolved before any further progress is attainable. (shrink)

Manipulation arguments that start from the intuition that manipulated agents are neither free nor morally responsible then conclude to that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. The Zygote argument is a special case of Manipulation argument in which the manipulation intervenes at the very conception of the agent. In this paper, I argue that the Zygote argument fails because (i) very few people share the basic intuitions the argument rests on, and (ii) even those who share this (...) intuition do so for reasons that are unrelated to determinism. Rather, I argue that intuitions about the Zygote argument (and Manipulation arguments in general) are driven by people's intuitions about the deep self, as shown by the fact that intuitions about manipulated agents depend on the moral value of the agent's behavior. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze Charles S. Peirce’s so-called “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”. Peirce formulated the Neglected Argument as a “nest” of three different but sequentially developed arguments. Taken as a whole, the Neglected Argument aims to show that engaging in a religious way of life, adoring and acting in accordance with the hypothesis of God, is a subjective, non-evidentially grounded though naturally founded human reaction, and that it is this (alleged) natural foundation that (...) makes it reasonable to accept the hypothesis of God as it being actually true, thereby grounding a properly religious way of life. I argue that Peirce’s Neglected Argument lacks of any serious apologetic force since it fails to justify, on independent, non-question-begging grounds, the claim that we are all naturally (and thus inevitably) lead to formulate, and later adore and act in accordance with, the hypothesis of God. (shrink)

Jaakko Hintikka proposed treating objectual perception sentences, such as ‘Alice sees Bob’, as de re propositional perception sentences. Esa Saarinen extended Hintikka’s idea to eventive perception sentences, such as ‘Alice sees Bob smile’. These approaches, elegant as they may be, are not philosophically neutral, for they presuppose, controversially, that the content of all perceptual experiences is propositional in nature. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal treatment of objectual and eventive perception sentences that builds on Hintikka’s modal (...) approach to propositional attitude ascriptions while avoiding controversial assumptions on the nature of perceptual experiences. Despite being simple and theoretically frugal, our approach is powerful enough to express a variety of interesting philosophical views about propositional, objectual, and eventive perception sentences, thus enabling the study of their inferential relationships. (shrink)

Most legal and political philosophers agree that typical legal systems are coercive. But there is no extant account of what typically makes typical legal systems coercive when they are coercive. This paper presents such an account and compares it with four alternative views. Towards the end I discuss the proposed account’s payoffs. Among other things, I show how it can help us explain what I call ‘comparative judgements’ about coercive legal systems (judgements such as ‘Legal system a is more coercive (...) than legal system b’) and how it can help the development of social scientific inquiries into the coerciveness of our legal systems. (shrink)

Mainstream philosophy has seen a recent flowering in discussions of intellectualism which revisits Gilbert Ryle’s famous distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and challenges his argument that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. These debates so far appear not to have engaged with pragmatist philosophy in any substantial way, which is curious as the relation between theory and practice is one of pragmatism’s main themes. Accordingly, this paper examines the contemporary debate in the light of Charles Peirce’s (...) habit-based epistemology. We argue both that knowing-that can be understood as a particularly sophisticated form of knowing-how, and that all bodily competencies—if sufficiently deliberately developed—can be analysed as instantiating propositional structure broadly conceived. In this way, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism are seen to be not opposed, and both true, although Peirce’s original naturalistic account of propositional structure does lead him to reject what we shall call ‘linguistic intellectualism’. (shrink)

In this paper we propose an informal exposition of the structure approach in the philosophy of science. Scientific knowledge is here considered as a collection of scientific theories. Each scientific theory has logico-linguistic, model-representing, pragmatic-procedural, and problem-heuristical subsystems and a subsystem of ties. The pivotal methodological concept for the exact description of these subsystems is the named set. We also outline the possibility of applying the structure-nominative approach to certain problems in the philosophy of science.

Interpretation in science has gained little attention in the past because philosophers of science believed that interpretation belongs to the context of discovery or must be associated with meaning. But scientists often speak about interpretation when they report their findings. Elsewhere I have argue in favour of a pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation, and it is in light of this theory that I suggest we can understand interpretation in the natural sciences.

This article investigates the convergence between Kierkegaard’s concept of despair and Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism. The piece argues that (1) both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rely on an internal critique of ways of life which collapse on their own terms; (2) both despair and nihilism involve a radical, existential aporia and double-mindedness which can be (3) either conscious or non-conscious; (4) there is some overlap between the main types of nihilism and the different types of inauthentic (non-conscious) despair; (5) finally, a (...) comparison with Nietzsche makes it possible to make sense of inauthentic despair without resorting to theological presuppositions or a twentieth century depth psychology notion of the unconscious. (shrink)

In this article I interpret John Rawls’s concept of the original position as a spiritual exercise. In addition to the standard interpretation of the original position as an expository device to select principles of justice for the fundamental institutions of society, I argue that Rawls also envisages it as a “spiritual exercise”: a voluntary personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of the self. To make this argument, I draw on the work of Pierre Hadot, a philosopher and classicist, (...) who introduced the idea of spiritual exercises as central to ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy. By reading Rawls alongside Hadot, this article portrays Rawls as a thinker deeply concerned with the question of how subjects can lead more just and fulfilling lives. It also proposes that the original position as a spiritual exercise can help defend liberalism as a social and political doctrine. (shrink)

I propose and defend a novel view called ‘de se consequentialism’, which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates — contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others — that a consequentialist theory employing agent-neutral value is logically consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, de se consequentialism clarifies both the nature of agent-centered constraints and why philosophers have found them puzzling, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated non-consequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist (...) or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, it is no coincidence that de se consequentialism mimics constraints: its distinctive feature is the very feature through which non-consequentialist theories enact them. (shrink)

This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.