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28263.964289
It is a pleasure to read and respond to Professor Orr’s learned statement of a conservatism, one that is both rooted in tradition and updated to the contemporary. Conservatism’s top values, we learn, are order, hierarchy, a sense of belonging to a particular community in a particular time and place, a deference to tradition, and a resistance to changes that are too sweeping or too quick. Simultaneously, conservatism is distrustful of abstract definitions, eschews commitments to universal principles and certainties, preferring the empirical, the particular, and the pragmatic. Professor Orr devotes a paragraph or two to explicating further each of those core concepts.
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28297.964432
The most direct route to political fundamentals is to ask: What should governments do? The different ‘isms’—liberalism, socialism, fascism, and so on—answer that question based on their most cherished values, holding that the purpose of government is to achieve those values. Yet societies are complex and we create many kinds of social institutions—businesses, schools, friendships and families, sports teams, churches/synagogues/mosques/temples, associations dedicated to artistic and scientific pursuits, governments, and so on—to achieve our important values.
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28321.964448
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which contemporary political debates fail to address the underlying philosophical arguments that inform the way we govern our societies and the leaders we elected to do so. It is therefore with tremendous pleasure that I hosted a set of both written and in-person discussions between two of the great minds of modern political and philosophical thought. As you will see, Dr. James Orr, a friend and regular guest on my show, sets out with tremendous clarity and skill the arguments for the conservative worldview. He is ably challenged by Professor Stephen R. C. Hicks, another friend and favourite interviewee of mine, who argues for liberalism as the correct orientation towards the world. The debate is hugely informative, productive, and, I hope, of use to the reader—it certainly has been to me.
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36018.964463
Common ground is the information that the participants in a conversation treat as background information for the purposes of their interaction. We review two traditions of research on common ground: The formal tradition, consisting mainly of theoretical linguists and philosophers of language, has developed increasingly sophisticated formal models of common ground in order to generate predictions about an expanding range of empirical phenomena. Meanwhile, the psycholinguistic tradition has focused on a narrower range of phenomena while developing more realistic theories of the psychological mechanisms that allow us to select and represent common ground. After summarizing these two traditions, we consider several reasons why they should be re-integrated, and argue that the best way to bring them back together would be to adopt a cognitive-pluralist approach, whereby language users have access to a variety of mechanisms for managing background information, which are more or less available and efficient depending on the communicative situation and the kind of information mentally represented, as well as the cognitive demands of each mechanism.
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53329.964476
Suppose time is in fact continuous and modeled by the real numbers. It seems odd indeed to me that the real numbers should be the only possible way for time to run. The real numbers are a very specific mathematical system. …
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53330.964487
Phew. I’ve rarely had such a big reaction to something I’ve written. In my previous post, I argued for a feminist anti-natalism in the US currently, on the grounds that the package deal of pregnancy and early childrearing, especially with a male partner, is currently an intolerably bad deal for many if not most people contemplating it. …
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53330.964497
Assume an Aristotelian account of substantial form on which forms are found in the informed things. A classic question is whether substantial forms are shared between members of the same kind or whether each individual has their own numerically (but maybe not qualitatively) distinct form. …
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55239.964507
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 at the mesoscale in this domain and, consequently, a polarization of the analysis at the micro and macroscales. 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 could 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 moves beyond static neural measures to account for the emergent and dynamic nature of social cognition.
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55263.964517
Suppose we consider an agent with both numerical credences and all-or-nothing beliefs. This agent might also have a plan about how she is going to update her beliefs upon receiving new evidence. What rational requirements on such a plan can be justified from an epistemic value point of view? Plan Almost Lockean Revision is the claim that it is rationally required that one’s planned beliefs are exactly one’s sufficiently high conditional credences. We start by reviewing arguments available for Plan Lockean Revision in the current literature, ultimately concluding that they are non-optimal. We provide a better argument to the effect that the belief updating rule that is expected to be the best according to one’s current credences is exactly Plan Almost Lockean Revision, that is, we prove a Qualitative Greaves-Wallace Theorem. Furthermore, building on the work of (Rothschild, 2021), we investigate the dutchbookability of Lockean betting behavior for all-or-nothing beliefs and their plannings, ultimately proving a qualitative version of the dutch strategy theorem which leads to the development of novel dutch-strategy/accuracy-dominance arguments for Lockean norms on belief/belief-planning pairs.
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55318.964529
A number of authors (Morgan, 1999; Boumans, 2005; Morrison, 2009; Massimi and Bhimji, 2015; Parker, 2017) have argued that models can be quite literally thought of as measuring instruments. I here challenge this view by reconstructing three arguments from the literature and rebutting them. Further, I argue that models should be seen as cognitive rather than measuring instruments, and that the distinction is important for understanding scientific change: Both yield two distinct sources of insight that mutually depend on each other, and should not be equated. In particular, we may perform the exact same actions in the laboratory but conceive of them entirely differently by virtue of the models we endorse at different points in time.
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55338.964538
The gravitational Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect, where quantum particles acquire phase shifts in curvature-free regions due to a gauge-fixed metric perturbation hµν , highlights the intriguing gauge dependence of spacetime. This study explores whether Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), which views spacetime as emerging from SU(2)- and diffeomorphism-invariant spin networks, can accommodate this effect. The AB effect suggests that LQG should incorporate gauge dependence at the quantum level, which appears challenging within its relational, gauge-invariant framework. Potential modifications to LQG, such as introducing gauge-fixing constraints or effective fields, may require assumptions aligned with substantivalism, potentially diverging from its emergent paradigm. These results invite a thoughtful reconsideration of spacetime’s ontological status, encouraging a dialogue between relational and substantivalist perspectives in quantum gravity.
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55356.964548
In a recent reply to my criticisms (Found. Phys. 55:5, 2025), Carcassi, Oldofredi, and Aidala (COA) admitted that their no-go result for ψ-ontic models is based on the implicit assumption that all states are equally distinguishable, but insisted that this assumption is a part of the ψ-ontic models defined by Harrigan and Spekkens, thus maintaining their result’s validity. In this note, I refute their argument again, emphasizing that the ontological models framework (OMF) does not entail this assumption. I clarify the distinction between ontological distinctness and experimental distinguishability, showing that the latter depends on dynamics absent from OMF, and address COA’s broader claims about quantum statistical mechanics and Bohmian mechanics.
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55378.964557
Measuring diversity in microbial ecology and microbiome studies is fraught with challenges, rendering the assessment of its ”real-world” value nearly impossible. The instability of taxonomic classification, difficulty in isolating individuals, and reliance on DNA-based methods and statistical tools all contribute to the complexity of measuring diversity reliably. This manuscript explores the underlying philosophical issues, relating them to the measurement problem in philosophy. I argue that traditional philosophical accounts of measurement, including representational, operationalist, and realist approaches, are insufficient to address these issues. Instead, I examine these challenges through the lens of a model-based perspective on measurement, which can remain agnostic about entities and property ontologies, clarify the role of assumptions in diversity measurement, and provide solutions for justifying measurement procedures. This work emphasizes the importance of calibration and clearly defining measurement purposes, providing avenues for scientists to improve their measurement procedures. Ultimately, I contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities in measuring microbial diversity by bridging the gap between philosophy and scientific practice.
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55403.964566
There has been considerable discussion in the philosophical literature of the past decade or so of a view that has come to be known as “wave function realism,” which I will abbreviate as WFR. The basic claim of this view is that quantum theory gives us motivation to think that quantum wave functions should be thought of as fields on a space of very high (or perhaps infinite) dimension, and that this space is in some important sense more fundamental than familiar three-dimensional space or four-dimensional spacetime. Note that this is much stronger than the mere claim that quantum states represent something physically real, a claim that I myself have defended (Myrvold 2020a, 2020b).
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55425.964576
Philosophers of physics, when engaged in matters they regard as fundamental, tend to focus their analyses on fictitious systems that are wholly isolated from their environments. When pressed, they retreat to the fiction of treating the universe as a whole as an object of scientific study. This is nothing at all like the way science is practiced. Even if a system can be insulated in such a way that its interactions with its surroundings are negligible, one only ever explicitly models a minute fraction of the degrees of freedom of the system, and, as the degrees of freedom explicitly considered interact with those that are not, those degrees of freedom that are treated in the model constitute what is, in effect, an open system.
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156954.964585
The work of George Eliot (1819–1880) challenges any strong
disjunction between philosophy and art. Her deepest philosophical
interests were in ethics, aesthetics, and the relation between them. Indebted above all to Spinozism and Romanticism, she developed her
thinking in sustained dialogue with the European philosophical
tradition, both before and after she began to write fiction under the
pseudonym “George Eliot” in 1857. She wrote novels,
shorter stories, poetry, and review essays, and throughout her career
she experimented with literary form. Through her bestselling novels,
her engagements with philosophy and with contemporary questions about
morality, art, politics, feminism, religion and science reached wide
readerships.
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186349.964595
This paper proposes a theory-neutral formal framework designed to accommodate data that implicates consciousness in anomalous observer-linked phenomena, including structured accounts sometimes interpreted as involving alleged non-human intelligence. Motivated by growing empirical reports in which observer phenomenology appears coupled to system behavior, the paper introduces an explanatory workspace that expands the standard quantum state space to include a phenomenal dimension.
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186405.964604
I introduce Inevitable Actualization (IA), an ontological modality: if (1) the universe’s future time involves an unbounded sequence of causal trials (H∞) and (2) a state S has a non-zero physical probability Pn > in trial n such that the sum n=1 Pn diverges, then S is guaranteed to occur with probability one. IA is developed through a rigorous measure-theoretic foundation, probabilistic modeling with dependence (under standard mixing conditions) and absorbing-state exceptions, contrasting IA with classical modalities and modern multiverse theories. Positioned as a distinct third category alongside necessity and contingency, IA’s unique grounding rests on temporal structure and probability. I address objections (Boltzmann brains, the measure problem, and identity duplication) and illustrate IA’s implications for ethics, cosmology, and personal identity, acknowledging formal challenges.
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201641.964613
This is another attempt at an argument against inferentialism about logical constants. Given a world w, let w* be a world just like w except that it has added to it an extra spatiotemporally disconnected island universe containing exactly one hydrogen atom with a precisely specified wavefunction ψ0. …
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212244.964623
Suppose we have a backwards-infinite sequence of asexually reproducing chickens, ..., c−3, c−2, c−1, c0 with cn having a chance pn of producing a new chicken cn + 1 (chicken c0 may or may not have succeeded; the earlier ones have succeeded). …
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216432.964633
In the topic-sensitive theory of the logic of imagination due to Berto [3], the topic of the imaginative output must be contained within the imaginative input. That is, imaginative episodes can never expand what they are about. We argue, with Badura [2], that this constraint is implausible from a psychological point of view, and it wrongly predicts the falsehood of true reports of imagination. Thus the constraint should be relaxed; but how? A number of direct approaches to relaxing the controversial content-inclusion constraint are explored in this paper. The core idea is to consider adding an expansion operator to the mereology of topics. The logic that results depends on the formal constraints placed on topic expansion, the choice of which are subject to philosophical dispute. The first semantics we explore is a topological approach using a closure operator, and we show that the resulting logic is the same as Berto’s own system. The second approach uses an inclusive and monotone increasing operator, and we give a sound and complete axiomatiation for its logic. The third approach uses an inclusive and additive operator, and we show that the associated logic is strictly weaker than the previous two systems, and additivity is not definable in the language. The latter result suggests that involved techniques or a more expressive language is required for a complete axiomatization of the system, which is left as an open question. All three systems are simple tweaks on Berto’s system in that the language remains propositional, and the underlying theory of topics is unchanged.
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223408.964646
The Quinean criterion for existential commitment is that we incur existential commitment precisely by affirming existentially quantified sentences. But what’s an existential quantifier? The inferentialist answer is that an existential quantifier is anything that behaves logically like an existential quantifier by obeying the rules of inference associated with quantifiers in classical logic. …
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283310.964656
Eliminative structuralist philosophers of mathematics insist that what mathematicians study is structures rather than specific realizations of these structures, like a privileged natural number system would be. …
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289707.964665
A seminal controversy in statistical inference is whether error probabilities associated with an inference method are evidentially relevant once the data are in hand. Frequentist error statisticians say yes; Bayesians say no. …
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300378.964682
This post is free to read, so please ‘like’ it via the heart below and share it widely. The best way to support my work is with a paid subscription. It’s the most predictable thing imaginable: the Trump administration, co-helmed by the rabid pro-natalist Elon Musk and the sadsack pallbearer of patriarchy, J.D. …
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347597.964692
Anne Bradstreet was born in England, and raised near Old England’s Boston. In 1630, when she was eighteen, her family crossed the Atlantic on the Arbella, and helped John Winthrop found Puritan New England. …
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357473.964701
Quarrels and wisecracks are essential features of interpersonal life. Quarrels are conflicts that typically take place only between friends, family, and those with whom we are personally engaged and whose attitudes toward us matter. Wisecracks are bits of improvised wit—banter, teasing, mockery, and ball busting—that also typically take place only in interpersonal life (note the following odd but revealing comment: “I can’t tease her like that; I barely even know her!”). Quarrels and cracks are, though, mutually exclusive. People know their quarrel is basically over once they start being amused by each others’ wisecracks again, and if you’re enjoying wisecracks with each other, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to quarrel at the same time. Why is this and what does it mean for interpersonal conflict? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question via a deep dive into the nature of wisecracking humor to explore the unrecognized—and valuable—role it plays in our interpersonal lives. In particular, there is a type of wisecracking humor that has a distinctive sort of interpersonal power, the power to dissolve the anger in quarrels in a surprising and productive way.
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359553.964712
Novel tools have allowed researchers to intervene into circuits at the mesoscale. The results of these interventions are often explained by appeal to functions. How are functions ascribed to circuit parts experimentally? I identify two kinds of function ascription practices in circuit interventions. Analysis of these practices shows us that function ascriptions are challenging due to a lack of interventive control and insufficient constraints on the class of candidate functions to discriminate in practice. One kind of function ascription practice— subtractive analysis—fares better at addressing these challenges.
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472497.964722
It has been argued that adult humans are absolutely time biased towards the future, at least as far as purely hedonic experiences (pain/pleasure) are concerned. What this means is that they assign zero value to them once they are in the past. Recent empirical studies have cast doubt on this claim, suggesting that while adults hold asymmetrical hedonic preferences – preferring painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future – these preferences are not absolute and are often abandoned when the quantity of pain or pleasure under consideration is greater in the past than in the future. Research has also examined whether such preferences might be affected by the utility people assign to experiential memories, since the recollection of past events can itself be pleasurable or aversive. We extend this line of research, investigating the utility people assign to experiential memories regardless of tense, and provide – to our knowledge – the first quantitative attempt at directly comparing the relative subjective weightings given to ‘primary’ experiences (i.e., living through the event first-hand) and ‘secondary’ (i.e., recollective or anticipatory) experiences. We find that when painful events are located in the past, the importance of the memory of the pain appears to be enhanced relative to its importance when they are located in the future. We also find extensive individual differences in hedonic preferences, reasons to adopt them, and willingness to trade them off. This research allows for a clearer picture of the utility people assign to the consumption of recollective experiences and of how this contributes to, or perhaps masks, time biases.
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474890.964731
The interpretation of quantum measurements presents a fundamental challenge in quantum mechanics, with concepts such as the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI), Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), and Bohmian Mechanics (BM) offering distinct perspectives. We propose the Branched Hilbert Subspace Interpretation (BHSI), which describes measurement as branching the local Hilbert space of a system into parallel subspaces. We formalize the mathematical framework of BHSI using branching and the engaging and disengaging unitary operators to relationally and causally update the states of observers. Unlike the MWI, BHSI avoids the ontological proliferation of worlds and copies of observers, realizing the Born rule based on branch weights. Unlike the CI, BHSI retains the essential features of the MWI: unitary evolution and no wavefunction collapse. Unlike the BM, BHSI does not depend on a nonlocal structure, which may conflict with relativity. We apply BHSI to examples such as the double-slit experiment, the Bell test, Wigner and his friend, and the black hole information paradox. In addition, we explore whether recohering branches can be achieved in BHSI. Compared to the CI and MWI, BHSI provides a minimalist, unitarity-preserving, collapse-free, and probabilistically inherent alternative interpretation of quantum measurements.