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3104.815953
Van Inwagen famously raised the Special Composition Question (SCQ): What is an informative criterion for when a proper plurality of objects composes a whole. There is, however, the Reverse Special Composition Question (RSCQ): What is an informative criterion for when an object is composed of a proper plurality? …
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6203.816042
I’ve been working on a math project involving the periodic table of elements and the Kepler problem—that is, the problem of a particle moving in an inverse square force law. I started it in 2021, but I just finished. …
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12294.816054
In How Intention Matters, I lamented the common myth that concern for people’s intentions and quality of will was inherently “Kantian” or otherwise non-consequentialist. Today we do the same for autonomy. …
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21664.816062
Most philosophical discussions of natural kinds concern entities in the category of substance: particles, chemical substances, organisms, etc. But I think we shouldn’t forget that there is good reason to posit natural kinds of entities in other categories. …
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23101.816069
In the philosophy of religion, ‘de jure objections’ is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of arguments for the conclusion that theistic belief is rationally impermissible, whether or not God exists. What we call ‘modal Calvinism’ counters these objections by proposing that ‘if God exists, God would ensure that theistic belief is rationally compelling on a global scale’, a modal conditional that is compatible with atheism. We respond to this modal Calvinist argument by examining it through the lenses of probability, modality, and logic – particularly, we apply analytical tools such as possible world semantics, Bayesian reasoning, and paraconsistent models. After examining various forms of the argument, we argue that none can compel atheists to believe that serious theistic possibilities worth considering would involve the purported divine measure.
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23191.816098
Alejandro Bortolus, Chad L. Hewitt, Veli Mitova, Evangelina Schwindt, Temitope O. Sogbanmu, Emelda E. Chukwu, Remco Heesen, Ricardo Kaufer, Hannah Rubin, Mike D. Schneider, Anne Schwenkenbecher, Helena Slanickova, Katie Woolaston, Li-an Yu
Determining appropriate mechanisms for transferring and translating research into policy has become a major concern for researchers (knowledge producers) and policymakers (knowledge users) worldwide. This has led to the emergence of a new function of brokering between researchers and policymakers, and a new type of agent called Knowledge Broker. Understanding these complex multi-agent interactions is critical for an efficient knowledge brokering practice during any given policymaking process. Here we present 1) the current diversity of knowledge broker groups working in the field of biosecurity and environmental management; 2) the incentives linking the different agents involved in the process (knowledge producers, knowledge brokers and knowledge users), and 3) the gaps, needs and challenges to better understand this social ecosystem. We also propose alternatives aimed at improving transparency and efficiency, including future scenarios where the role of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may become predominant in knowledge-brokering activities.
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23249.816109
Diagnosing patients with disorders of consciousness involves inductive risk: the risk of false negative and false positive results when gathering and interpreting evidence of consciousness. A recent proposal suggests mitigating that risk by incorporating patient values into methodological choices at the level of individual diagnostic techniques: when using machine-learning algorithms to detect neural evidence of responsiveness to commands, clinicians should consider the patient’s own preferences about whether avoiding false positives or false negatives takes priority (Birch, 2023). In this paper, I argue that this proposal raises concerns about how to ensure that inevitable non-epistemic value judgments do not outweigh epistemic considerations. Additionally, it comes with challenges related to the predictive accuracy of surrogate decision-makers and the decisional burden imposed on them. Hence, I argue that patient values should not be incorporated at the level of gathering evidence of consciousness, but that they should play the leading role when considering how to respond to that evidence.
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87021.816118
We establish the equivalence of two much debated impartiality criteria for social welfare orders: Anonymity and Permutation Invariance. Informally, Anonymity says that, in order to determine whether one social welfare distribution w is at least as good as another distribution v, it suffices to know, for every welfare level, how many people have that welfare level according to w and how many people have that welfare level according to v. Permutation Invariance, by contrast, says that, to determine whether w is at least as good as v, it suffices to know, for every pair of welfare levels, how many people have that pair of welfare levels in w and v respectively.
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109651.816125
Recent approaches in quantum gravity suggest that spacetime may not be a fundamental aspect of reality, but rather an emergent phenomenon arising from a more fundamental substratum. This raises a significant challenge for traditional accounts of laws of nature, which are typically grounded in spatiotemporal concepts. This paper discusses two non- Humean strategies for formulating laws of nature in the absence of spacetime: the ’non-temporal evolution’ approach and the ’global constraints’ approach. The argument begins by showing that the latter permits a more naturalistic stance than the former. A tentative defence is then provided against the objection that laws as global constraints are too thin to provide genuine metaphysical intelligibility and explanatory power.
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176623.816132
W.D. Hamilton in 1975 wrote a book chapter that constitutes his most extensive comments on human cooperation. In it he flagged the “tribal facies of social behavior” as the problem to be solved. He was well aware of the difficulty of extending his theory of inclusive fitness to the tribal scale. He mentions the idea that cultural processes might be responsible but expresses skepticism that culture could act against genetic fitness imperatives and sought genetic answers to the puzzle. We have explored the potential of culture to generate the stable variation necessary for selection at the level of tribes and other large human groups. We have modeled three forms of cultural group selection, and reviewed the ample empirical evidence that all three forms are important in humans. The reward and punishment systems in human societies can also create social selection on genes underlying human behavior. One of the critical factors in cultural evolution is that it can be faster than genetic evolution. Here we provide a simple model that illustrates why this is important to the evolution of the tribal facies.
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194593.816139
Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, made of 60 carbon atoms. If one of the bonds between two hexagons rotates, we get a weird mutant version of this molecule:
This is an example of a Stone-Wales transformation: a 90° rotation in a so-called ‘π bond’ between carbon atoms. …
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194593.816146
I confess that, when I allow myself to think about it, I am amazed that I understand so little about what it is we philosophers do. I believe I can distinguish good philosophical work from bad—I can recognize when philosophy is done well—but I do not have a clear understanding of what it is that I am recognizing, and when I try actually to say what our discipline does, my remarks turn out to be naive and crude, more like the groping efforts of a beginning student than like the contributions of an advanced scholar to the field. …
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272614.816153
Ever since Carlo Rovelli introduced Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) to the public [1], it has attracted the interest and stimulated the imagination not only of physicists, but also, and in particular, of philosophers. There are several reasons why that is so. One of them is, quite simply, that a renowned and highly esteemed researcher had offered a new programmatic attempt to make sense of the longstanding puzzles at the foundations of quantum theory, which only happens every so often. What is more, the key to these puzzles was supposed to lie in an essentially conceptual move, in the exposure of an “incorrect notion” [1, p. 1637]. But the modern-day philosopher regards concepts as something like their natural hunting ground. If mention is made of the word, it makes them sit up as if somebody had yelled their name.
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272646.81616
The idea that qualities can be had partly or to an intermediate degree is controversial among contemporary metaphysicians, but also has a considerable pedigree among philosophers and scientists. In this paper, we first aim to show that metaphysical sense can be made of this idea by proposing a partial taxonomy of metaphysical accounts of graded qualities, focusing on three particular approaches: one which explicates having a quality to a degree in terms of having a property with an in-built degree, another based on the idea that instantiation admits of degrees, and a third which derives the degree to which a quality is had from the aspects of multidimensional properties. Our second aim is to demonstrate that the choice between these account can make a substantial metaphysical difference. To make this point, we rely on two case studies (involving quantum observables and values) in which we apply the accounts in order to model apparent cases of metaphysical gradedness.
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277755.816167
A standard view of reasons is that reasons are propositions or facts that support an action. Thus, that I promised to visit is a reason to visit, that pain is bad is a reason to take an aspirin, and that I am hungry is a reason to eat. …
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279585.816174
Journal of the American Philosophical Association () – © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/.), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use.
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280847.816183
Today I learned about ‘rabbit starvation’ and how Neanderthals avoided it. When you’re a hunter-gatherer and it’s winter, you may try to survive by eating only meat—like rabbits, but also deer and other game. …
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282342.81619
This paper investigates the epistemological problem of understanding the formative principles of living organisms, proposing that such knowledge requires a non-discursive mode of cognition. Revisiting the philosophies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, the study explores an alternative method of understanding life—not through mechanistic models or speculative vitalism, but through what is termed “intellectual intuition.” It is demonstrated how Goethe’s concept of the Urpflanze and Steiner’s interpretation enable a mental reconstruction of organic development as a lawful, self-generating process. Drawing parallels with Fichte’s notion of self-awareness through productive cognition, the paper argues that organisms can be known through a productive act of thinking in which the generative principle of life is intellectually intuited. This yields a scientifically grounded, though non-empirical, mode of “empirical vitalism,” in which the organism’s entelechy—its vital laws and force—can be observed through active, intuitive cognition. The study suggests that such a methodology could offer a viable epistemic and metaphysical framework to overcome the limitations of both reductionist biology and speculative vitalism.
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282368.8162
A recent result from theoretical computer science provides for the verification of answers to the Halting Problem, even when there is no plausible means by which to derive those answers using a bottom-up approach. We argue that this result has profound implications for the existence of strongly emergent phenomena. In this work we develop a computer science-based framework for thinking about strong emergence and in doing so demonstrate the plausibility of strongly emergent phenomena existing in our universe. We identify six sufficient criteria for strong emergence and detail the actuality of five of the six criteria. Finally, we argue for the plausibility of the sixth criterion by analogy and a case study of Boltzmann brains (with additional case studies provided in the appendices.)
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282392.816209
I will look at Bohr’s contentious doctrine of classical concepts - the claim that measurement requires classical concepts to be understood - and argue that measurement theory supports a similar conclusion. I will argue that representing a property in terms of a metric scale, which marks a shift from the empirical process of measurement to the informational output, introduces the inherently classical assumption of definite states and precise values, thus fulfilling Bohr’s doctrine. I examine how realism about metric scales implies that Bohr’s doctrine is ontological, while more moderate coherentist or model-based approaches to realism render it epistemological. Regardless of one’s stance towards measurement realism, however, measurement cannot be entirely quantum and quantum mechanics can model only the empirical side of measurement, not its informational output. Finally, I discuss how this might influence our understanding of the measurement problem.
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282414.816217
I argue that the epistemic aim of scientific theorizing (EAST) is producing theories with the highest possible number and degree of theoretical virtues (call this “TV-EAST”). I trace TV- EAST’s logical empiricist origins and discuss its close connections to Kuhn’s and Laudan’s problem-solving accounts of the aim of science. Despite TV-EAST’s antirealist roots, I argue that if one adopts the realist view that EAST is finding true theories, one should also endorse TV-EAST. I then defend TV-EAST by showing that it addresses the challenges raised against using the “aim of science” metaphor and offers significant advantages over the realist account.
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368791.816225
This paper proposes a dynamic temporal logic that is appropriate for modeling the dynamics of scientific knowledge (especially in historical sciences, such as Archaeology, Paleontology and Geology). For this formalization of historical knowledge, the work is divided into two topics: firstly, we define a temporal branching structure and define the terms for application in Philosophy of Science; Finally, we define a logical system that consists of a variation of Public Announcement Logic in terms of temporal logic, with appropriate rules in a tableaux method.
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428099.816232
This is Part II of my commentary on Stephen Senn’s guest post, Be Careful What You Wish For. In this follow-up, I take up two topics:
(1) A terminological point raised in the comments to Part I, and
(2) A broader concern about how a popular reform movement reinforces precisely the mistaken construal Senn warns against. …
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433505.816241
Some philosophers hold that unstructured groups themselves, as opposed to the members of these groups, can have moral duties. There are different accounts of how such collective duties might be grounded in facts about individual duties of the group members. In this paper, I highlight and discuss some questions for these accounts that seem to warrant more exploration than they have received so far. First, if there is a collective duty to ϕ that is grounded in individual duties, how does ϕ-ing feature in the individual duties? The accounts that ground a collective duty to ϕ in individual duties specify these individual duties with reference to ϕ- ing. But if a collective duty to ϕ is grounded in individual duties, then, on pain of circularity, the individual duties cannot be specified in terms of a collective duty to ϕ. Second, are the individual duties that ground collective moral duties themselves also moral duties? Or are the individual duties, rather, rational duties? I will suggest that the individual duties should be classified neither as purely moral nor as purely rational, but rather as rational duties of moral agents. Finally, are the grounding individual duties perspective-dependent, i.e., do they depend on the epistemic situation of the members, as several philosophers have suggested? I argue that accounts of collective obligations should not commit themselves to an answer to this question, but rather leave the question to general ethical theories that do not focus on contexts of collective duties.
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433557.816248
| The boundary problem in normative democratic theory is the problem of who should be entitled to participate in which democratic decision-making. The boundary problem is at the heart of many pressing political issues, including voting rights of resident aliens in their host countries and of expats in their home countries, the legitimacy of border regimes, the justi!ability of global democracy, and the democratic representation of future generations. The two most popular answers to the boundary problem are the
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434944.816256
Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at the lovely views, she smells the flowers in season, she gathers mushrooms, she listens to the birds chirping, she climbs a tree, and so on. …
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446114.816263
This paper deals with a rather wide range of topics, each one of which probably deserves (at least) a monograph-length study of its own, and for each one of which there is an extensive literature. There is no way that one can do justice to all of that in the span of a single paper. Now that may be a good reason not to try to do so, but rather to stick with one issue, one view. However, sometimes it can be useful to take a broad perspective, treat a variety of questions and observationsas making up a single subject matter, one that can be approached from various angles. Sure, that does result in a lack of detail, but one may hope that one makes good for that by showing connections that otherwisewould go unnoticed. This paper is written in that spirit.
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450659.81627
Wouldn’t it be great if Democrats prioritized a drastic increase in American productivity, thereby deprioritizing safetyism, wokeness, and redistribution? That’s definitely my view, so I’m delighted that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (henceforth KT) have written a whole book — Abundance sans subtitle — defending that position. …
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450660.816276
Some philosophers think that for your right action to be morally worthy you have to know that the action is right. On the contrary, there are cases where an action is even more morally worthy when you don’t know it’s right. …
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453625.816284
Very short summary: In this essay, I discuss Gerald Gaus’s argument about the possibility of moral reconciliation in diverse societies. Like Gaus, I use an agent-based model to explore the conditions under which convergence toward a single social rule happens. …