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30420.331926
Apparently, Italy requires residents to secure a medical certificate before joining a gym, sports club, or other source of regular physical exercise. This is (very loosely) estimated to prevent a few deaths per year from sudden cardiac events but at a net cost of thousands of QALYs lost due to exercise deterrence. …
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34729.332081
In philosophy of science, the pseudosciences (like cryptozoology, homeopathy, Flat-Earth Theory, anti-vaccination activism, etc.) have been treated mainly negatively. They are viewed not simply as false, but even dangerous, since they try to mimic our best scientific theories, thus gaining respect and trust from the public, without the appropriate credentials. As a result, philosophers have traditionally put considerable effort into demarcating genuine sciences and scientific theories from pseudoscience. Since these general attempts at demarcation have repeatedly been shown to break down, the present paper takes a different and somewhat more positive approach to the study of pseudoscience. My main point is not that we should embrace and accept the pseudosciences as they are, but rather that there are indeed valuable and important lessons inherent in the study of pseudoscience and the different sections of the paper list at least six of them. By showing, through numerous examples, how (the study of) pseudoscience can teach us something about science, ourselves, and society, it makes the case that as philosophers, we should devote more time and energy to engaging with such beliefs and theories to help remedy their harmful effects.
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121119.332106
Scenarios and pathways, as defined and used in the “SSP-RCP scenario framework”, are key in last decade’s climate change research and in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this framework, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) consist of a limited set of alternative socioeconomic futures, that are both represented in short qualitative narratives and with quantitative projections of key drivers. One important use of the computationally derived SSP-scenarios is to do mitigation analysis and present a “manageable” set of options to decision-makers. However, all SSPs and derivatively SSP-scenarios in this framework assume a globally growing economy into 2100. This, in practice, amounts to a value-laden restriction of the space of solutions to be presented to decision-makers, falling short of IPCC’s general mandate of being “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive”. Yet, the Global Economic Growth Assumption (GEGA) could be challenged and in practice is challenged by post-growth scholars.
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206223.332125
Very short summary: This essay provides an account in favor of a progressive consumption tax, in light of the efficiency and fairness issues that affect the more common progressive income tax. I argue that the progressive consumption tax not only avoids the standard incentive problem but also responds to Hayek’s critique of the unfairness of progressive taxation. …
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286223.332142
I’m a non-conformist, but not a reflexive contrarian. My chief goal is to enjoy every day of my life, and my non-conformism is only a means to that end. But what a means it is! By the power of non-conformism, I weasel out of hours of daily drudgery. …
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293868.332159
Behavioral innovativeness—the propensity of an individual organism or higher group to innovate—is frequently invoked as a measurable trait allowing for cross-species comparisons. Individuals or species are often regarded as more innovative or less innovative than others, implying that we can rank order the degree of innovativeness along a single dimension. This paper defends a novel multidimensional understanding of behavioral innovativeness in which innovativeness can be modulated with respect to the generation and capitalization of opportunities, as well as the effectiveness and depth of the innovative behaviors. Besides innovation being multidimensional, it is also multilevel. Here we show how innovativeness at one level (such as the species level) does not automatically translate to innovativeness at another (such as the organism level) and discuss why this matters for cross-species comparisons.
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293889.332177
A common criticism of medicine is that there is too much focus on treating symptoms instead of patients. This criticism and its sentiment – among other factors – have motivated many ‘humanistic,’ ‘holistic,’ and ‘non-reductionist’ approaches to medicine including the biopsychosocial model, patient-centered medicine, ‘gentle’ medicine, and others. Much has been said detailing and defending these approaches. My aim here is not to further defend one or any of these. Rather, my aim is to better understand what is at the heart of the ‘common criticism,’ i.e., that treating symptoms – not patients – is bad. What does this mean? Are symptoms not something patients have? By treating symptoms, do clinicians not necessarily treat the patients that have them?
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293968.332194
Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present...But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power…We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. (Valéry 1964 [1928], 225) The passage describes a moment in the history of art in the West in the 20th century characterized by the introduction of new artistic technologies of production and reproduction such as photography. The passage serves as the epigraph to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in which he contends that the analyses necessitated by the condition described by Paul Valery compels us to “brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery…” (Benjamin 1969[1936]).
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465275.332241
It was a particularly cruel heckling. Ketel Marte, a star baseball player for the Arizona Diamondbacks, was brought to tears by a heckler who shouted derogatory comments about Marte’s late mother, Elpidia Valdez, who died in a car crash in 2017. …
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552985.332261
Scientists decide to perform an experiment based on the expectation that their efforts will bear fruit. While assessing such expectations belongs to the everyday work of practicing scientists, we have a limited understanding of the epistemological principles underlying such assessments. Here I argue that we should delineate a “context of pursuit” for experiments. The rational pursuit of experiments, like the pursuit of theories, is governed by distinct epistemic and pragmatic considerations that concern epistemic gain, likelihood of success, and feasibility. A key question that arises is: what exactly is being evaluated when we assess experimental pursuits? I argue that, beyond the research questions an experiment aims to address, we must also assess the concrete experimental facilities and activities involved, because (1) there are often multiple ways to address a research question, (2) pursuitworthy experiments typically address a combination of research questions, and (3) experimental pursuitworthiness can be boosted by past experimental successes. My claims are supported by a look into ongoing debates about future particle colliders.
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553008.332281
The question of which scientific ideas are worth pursuing is a fundamental challenge in science, particularly in fields where the stakes are high, and resources are limited. When the research is also time-sensitive, then the challenge becomes even greater. Philosophers of science have analyzed the pursuitworthiness of science from multiple perspectives, on topics ranging from whether there is a logic of pursuit (Feyerabend 1975; Shaw 2022), whether scientific standards ought to be relaxed in times of “fast science” (Friedman and Šešelja 2023; Stegenga 2024) as well as the role of criticism in evaluating scientific pursuits (DiMarco and Khalifa 2022).
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553033.3323
This article revisits Taurek’s famous question: Should the greater number be saved in situations of resource scarcity? At the heart of this debate lies a central issue in normative ethics—whether numerical superiority can constitute a moral pro tanto reason. Engaging with this question helps to illuminate core principles of normative theory. Welfarismmin presents a pro-number position. The article first outlines Taurek’s original argument. It then examines non-welfarist responses and explains why they remain unsatisfactory. Finally, it identifies the main shortcomings of the hybrid welfarismmin approach and suggests a possible alternative for more adequately addressing the Taurek problem.
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626401.33232
Tarot is widely disdained as a way of finding things out. Critics claim it is bunk or—worse— a wretched scam. This disdain misunderstands both tarot and the activity of finding thing out. I argue that tarot is an excellent tool for inquiry. It initiates and structures percipient conversation and contemplation about important, challenging, and deep topics. It galvanises creative attention, especially towards inward-looking, introspective inquiry and openminded, collaborative inquiry with others. Tarot can cultivate virtues like epistemic playfulness and cognitive dexterity.
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637993.332345
Very short summary: This is a two-part essay on the crisis of contemporary liberalism. I argue that this crisis reflects the growing influence of a conception of the political as a praxis that is beyond human rationality and reason. …
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639143.332378
The epistemic projection approach (EPA) is an intermediate approach to value management in science. It recognizes that there are sometimes good reasons to make research responsive to contextual values, but it achieves this responsiveness via the careful formulation of a research problem in the problem-selection stage of investigation. EPA is thus an approach that could be acceptable to some parties on both sides of the debate over the value-free ideal. Independent of this, EPA provides practitioners with concrete guidance on how to make research responsive to contextual values. This is illustrated with an example involving air pollution.
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865379.332395
▼ AbStrACt Since the early days of its professionalization, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the history of science has been seen as a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities. However, only one aspect of this triadic nexus, the relations between the history of science and the natural sciences, has been extensively discussed. The other aspect, the relations between the history of science and the humanities, has been less commented upon. With this paper I hope to make a small step towards redressing this imbalance, by discussing the relationships between the history of science and two other humanistic disciplines that have been historically and institutionally associated with it: the philosophy of science and general history. I argue that both of these relationships are marked by the characteristics of an unrequited friendship: on the one hand, historians of science have ignored, for the most part, calls for collaboration from their philosopher colleagues; and, on the other hand, historians specializing in other branches of history have been rather indifferent, again for the most part, to the efforts of historians of science to understand science as a historical phenomenon.
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905397.332414
Imagine living in a society where most people (at least in the privileged classes) regularly participate in perpetuating a moral atrocity—slavery, say, or factory farming; any practice you’re deeply appalled by will do. …
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1057064.332431
For Raz, “the fundamental point about authority [is that] it removes the decision from one person to another.” It is a good question why you should allow someone else to decide for you what you are to do. One plausible response is to observe that, under the right conditions, by allowing someone else to decide for you, you are more likely to do what you ought to do anyway than if you decide what to do for yourself. That, in a nutshell, is the diagnosis of and solution to the problem of authority that Raz offers us. I agree that Raz raises an important question, and I shall not dispute his answer. I do maintain that there is a narrower and perhaps less tractable problem with “authority” that Raz misses— a problem about obedience. My aim is to bring this concern into clearer focus.
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1094836.332448
The present review discusses the literature on how and when social category information and individuating information influence people’s implicit judgments of other individuals who belong to existing (i.e., known) social groups. After providing some foundational information, we discuss several key principles that emerge from this literature: (a) individuating information moderates stereotype-based biases in implicit (i.e., indirectly measured) person perception, (b) individuating information usually exerts small to no effects on attitude-based biases in implicit person perception, (c) individuating information influences explicit (i.e., directly measured) person perception more than implicit person perception, (d) social category information affects implicit person perception more than it affects explicit person perception, and (e) the ability of other variables to moderate the effects of individuating information on stereotype- and attitude-based biases in implicit person perception varies. Within the discussion of each of these key points, relevant research questions that remain unaddressed in the literature are presented. Finally, we discuss both theoretical and practical implications of the principles discussed in this review.
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1108513.332468
Synthetic media generators, such as DALL-E, and synthetic media artifacts, such as deepfakes, undermine our fundamental epistemic standards and practices. Yet, the nature of their epistemic threat remains elusive. After all, fictional or distorted representations of reality are as old as photography. We argue that the novel epistemic threat of synthetic media is that, for the first time, synthetic media tools afford ordinary computer users the practicable possibility to cheaply and effortlessly create and widely share fictional worlds indistinguishable from the real world or credible representations of it. We further argue that a synthetic media artifact is epistemically malignant in a given media context for a person acquainted with the context when the person is misled to confuse the version of the world depicted in it with the real world in an epistemically or morally significant way.
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1234739.332488
Political meritocracy is the idea that political institutions should aim to empower those people who are particularly well-suited to rule. This article surveys recent literature in democratic theory that argues on behalf of institutional arrangements that aim to realize the ideal of political meritocracy. We detail two prominent families of meritocratic proposals: nondemocratic meritocracy and weighted voting. We then describe and briefly evaluate five potentially important criticisms of political meritocracy related to the coherence of merit as an ideal, the demographic objection, rent-seeking, political inequality, and social peace. We also consider the key ways in which existing electoral democracies create spaces for institutionally meritocratic forms. Finally, we highlight the importance of exploring institutional innovations that allow democracies to effectively incorporate expertise without, at the same time, becoming vulnerable to the criticisms of political meritocracy that we discuss.
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1387984.332508
In this paper, we address a key question that has been central to discussions on rationality: is the concept of rationality normative or merely descriptive? We present the findings of a corpus-linguistic study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative.
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1388034.332529
Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people’s concepts at a later time than the intervention without participant’s knowledge, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise planet and dinosaur in online participants to match experts’ concepts. We successfully revised planet but not dinosaur, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on.
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1502126.332545
Have the points in Stephen Senn’s guest post fully come across? Responding to comments from diverse directions has given Senn a lot of work, for which I’m very grateful. But I say we should not leave off the topic just yet. …
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1562174.332565
Most recent theorists take social norms to arise from certain attitudes, such as expectations on others, perhaps along with conforming practices. Challenging this view, we argue that social norms are instead grounded in a social norming process: an (often non-verbal) social communication process that institutes or ‘makes’ the norm. We present different versions of a process-based account of social norms and social normativity. The process-based view brings social norms closer to legal norms, by taking social norms to arise through ‘expressive acts’, just as some laws and contracts arise through acts of voting or signing, not through mere attitudes. Social norms should be distinguished from social pressures, which often co-exist with social norms but are caused by attitudes.
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1569527.332586
I’m so frustrated by low-decoupling academics who refuse to acknowledge basic evaluative facts (like that, all else equal, it’s better to have smarter, healthier children) because they’re terrified of what they—mistakenly!—imagine to be the implications. …
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1585647.332603
I suggest a unified account of conditional oughts and of contrastive reasons. The core of the account is an explanation of facts about conditional oughts in terms of facts about contrastive reasons, and a reduction of contrastive reasons to non-contrastive reasons. In rejecting contrastivism about reasons, the account is consistent with orthodoxy about reasons. Moreover, it extends a standard view of how oughts and reasons are related to one another, and it makes sense of important and explanatorily recalcitrant phenomena. To the extent to which the account involves an explanation of facts about conditional oughts, it does not directly compete with semantic analyses of statements about conditional oughts. However, as I indicate in passing, the account coheres well with an important type of such analyses, while it is inconsistent with others.
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1639472.332621
There is large consensus across clinical research that feelings of worthlessness (FOW) are one of the highest risk factors for a patient’s depression becoming suicidal. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of this empirical relationship from a phenomenological perspective. I propose that there are purely reactive and pervasive forms of FOW. Subsequently, I present a phenomenological demonstration for how and why it is pervasive FOW that pose a direct suicidal threat. I then outline criteria, contingent upon empirical verification, by which clinicians can more confidently identify when a patient’s FOW place them at high risk of suicide.
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1754804.332638
Several anecdotal claims about the relationship between philosophical discourse and the subject of autism have been forwarded in recent years. This paper seeks to verify or debunk these descriptive claims by carefully examining the philosophical literature on autism. We conduct a comprehensive scoping review to answer the question, what do philosophers talk about when they talk about autism? This empirical work confirms that the philosophy of autism is underdeveloped as a subfield of philosophy. Moreover, the way that philosophers engage with autism is often unreflective and uncritical.
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1754828.332658
Hyperscanning has been increasingly used to quantify the quality of social relationships by tracking the neural correlates of interpersonal interactions. This paper critically examines the use of hyperscanning to track the neural correlates of psychotherapeutic change, e.g., the patient-therapist relationship. First, we motivate our project by diagnosing a lack of complex models in this domain and, looking for the causes of this issue, we highlight the epistemic blindspots of current methodologies that prioritize neural synchrony as a marker of therapeutic success. Drawing on empirical studies and theoretical frameworks, we identify an asymmetry between the neural and behavioral conceptual toolkits, with the latter remaining underdeveloped. We argue that this imbalance stems from two key issues: the underdetermined qualitative interpretation of brain data and the neglect of strong reciprocity in neuroscientific second-person paradigms. In light of our critical analysis, we suggest that further research should address the complexity of reciprocal, dynamic interactions in therapeutic contexts. Specifically, drawing on enactivism, we highlight that the autonomy of interactions is one of the factors that undermines the synchrony paradigm. This approach emphasizes the co-construction of meaning and shared experiences through embodied, reciprocal interactions, offering a more integrative understanding of therapeutic change that accounts for neural correlates of the emergent and dynamic nature of social cognition.