1. 25020.166258
    In his discussion of the cognitive character and epistemic value of art, philosopher Nelson Goodman suggests that artworks have the capacity to “inform what we encounter later and elsewhere” (Goodman, 1968, p. 260). Indeed, for Goodman, if art has cognitive value, it lies, at least partly, in its ability to change how we experience the world. “What a Manet or Monet or Cézanne does to our subsequent seeing of the world,” Goodman writes, “is as pertinent to their appraisal as is any direct confrontation” (ibid.).
    Found 6 hours, 57 minutes ago on Andreas Elpidorou's site
  2. 35732.166397
    When I give talks about the way modern science is based on beauty, I give the example of how everyone will think Newton’s Law of Gravitation - F = Gm1m2/r2 is more plausible than what one might call “Pruss’s Law of Gravitation” - F = Gm1m2/r2.00000000000000000000000001 even if they fit the observation data equally, and even if (2) fits the data slightly better. …
    Found 9 hours, 55 minutes ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  3. 36855.166416
    Person-affecting views in population ethics state that (in cases where all else is equal) we’re permitted but not required to create people who would enjoy good lives. In this paper, I present an argument against every possible variety of person-affecting view. The argument takes the form of a dilemma. Narrow person-affecting views must embrace at least one of three implausible verdicts in a case that I call ‘Expanded Non- Identity.’ Wide person-affecting views run into trouble in a case that I call ‘Two-Shot Non-Identity.’ One plausible practical upshot of my argument is as follows: we individuals and our governments should be doing more to reduce the risk of human extinction this century.
    Found 10 hours, 14 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  4. 36880.167522
    A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream scepticism, and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge.
    Found 10 hours, 14 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  5. 36905.167544
    How do we use language to refer to whatever we have in mind? The question is deceptively simple. The complications are right there, however, for everyone to see. The question invokes language language use reference, and human minds and we should not pretend to know the whole truth about any of these things. In Talking About, however, I try to answer the question by integrating a great deal of both classic and current work—in philosophy, cognitive science, and elsewhere— and by making some very specific assumptions about the four troublemakers, again; language use reference minds The central notion is pragmatic competence. This is the capacity to perform speech acts with a suite of specific audience-directed intentions. The capacity is grounded and explained by the normal operation of some biological, cognitive mechanism in humans. Aliens and AIs might certainly have something similar or functionally equivalent but still, the target is to understand the human capacity. The capacity to perform speech acts in which one refers to a single object is a very sophisticated aspect of pragmatic competence. I argue that such acts of reference have a proper function, namely, that they provide evidence of a referential intention. I think referential intentions are real phenomena in human brains, basically, they are sometimes part of the initial planning stages of utterance production. Moreover, I argue that such intentions can, in certain very specific circumstances, be irredeemably confused. Strictly speaking, on my view, those who are confused in this way will fail to refer to anything by the relevant utterances, because the intentions fail to determine any single object as the referent.
    Found 10 hours, 15 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  6. 36926.16757
    According to a prominent view, discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off. In this paper, I argue that this harm-based account runs into trouble because it cannot point to a harm, without making controversial metaphysical commitments, in cases of discrimination in which the discriminatory act kills the discriminatee. That is, the harm-based account suffers from a problem of death. I then show that the two main alternative accounts of the wrongness of discrimination—the mental-state-based account and the objective-meaning account—do not run into this problem.
    Found 10 hours, 15 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  7. 39350.167583
    Often, the kind of beauty that scientists, and especially physicists, look for in the equations that describe nature is taken to have simplicity as a primary component. While simplicity is important, I wonder if we shouldn’t be careful not to overestimate its role. …
    Found 10 hours, 55 minutes ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  8. 46029.167598
    A large majority of American college students — almost three-quarters — go to public schools. For four-year colleges, it’s about two-thirds. Yet strangely, these “public” schools aren’t equally open to the entire public. …
    Found 12 hours, 47 minutes ago on Bet On It
  9. 82117.167612
    In Who’s afraid of A. C. Bradley?comes out in favor of “talk[ing] about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people.” If “character criticism” is abandoned, you’ll miss most of what is good and important in the plays. …
    Found 22 hours, 48 minutes ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  10. 88833.167627
    In my last post, I sketched some first remarks I would have made had I been able to travel to London to fulfill my invitation to speak at a Royal Statistical Society conference, March 4 and 5, 2024, on “the promises and pitfalls of preregistration.” This is a continuation. …
    Found 1 day ago on D. G. Mayo's blog
  11. 152332.167642
    Stewart, Todd M. "When Is a Belief Formed in an Epistemically Circular Way?" Grazer Philosophische Studien 100, 3 (2023): 336-353. https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-00000192 been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications - Philosophy by an authorized administrator of ISU ReD: Research and eData. For more information, please contact ISUReD@ilstu.edu.
    Found 1 day, 18 hours ago on PhilPapers
  12. 194539.167662
    The overall point of the target article is to criticise the idea that any theory of intentionality must answer the ‘question of aboutness’: what makes it that case that any mental state can represent anything at all? I took the question as usually coming with two further conditions: first, that the answer to this question must be wholly general; and second, that the answer must not use any intentional or representational notions. Let’s call these the ‘generality condition’ and the ‘non-intentional condition’.
    Found 2 days, 6 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  13. 212928.168804
    Intolerance and polarization are on the up, or so the headlines say. If true, it’s happened before, and been far worse. Thomas Jefferson wrote, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. …
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  14. 212938.168835
    To understand why a phenomenon occurs, it is not enough to possess a correct explanation of the phenomenon: you must grasp the explanation. In this formulation, “grasp” is a placeholder, standing for the psychological or epistemic relation that connects a mind to the explanatory facts in such a way as to produce understanding. This paper proposes and defends an account of the “grasping” relation according to which grasp of a property (to take one example of the sort of entity that turns up in explanations) is a matter of recognitional ability: roughly, a property is grasped to the extent to which the would-be understander is capable of recognizing instances of the property.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Michael Strevens's site
  15. 212950.168849
    Warning: What follows contains a major spoiler of one of the recent short stories by sci-fi author Greg Egan, “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine.” If you’ve not read the story but would like to, read it before reading this post. …
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on The Archimedean Point
  16. 212952.168863
    Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. …
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Bet On It
  17. 212987.168877
    With regards to the inefficiencies and uncompromising situations within the humanities and social sciences field in Iran, the challenge of problematizing these sciences is inevitable. So far, numerous research analyzing humanities and social sciences’ problems in the Iranian academic system have been published. Considering the important role of humanities and social sciences in the modern Iranian society, we attempt to suggest a theoretical framework for the problematization of humanities and social sciences in Iran. The exploration of the main challenges facing humanities and social sciences in Iran from the community, academy and administration point of view, sparks three hypotheses. First, humanities and social sciences’ theories and teachings are not applied accurately. Second, the humanities and social sciences’ schools of thought are not chosen properly according to Iranian circumstances. And third, there are metaphysical differences between axioms and presupposition of humanities and social sciences having western origins and those with Islamic-Iranian culture. Keywords: Humanities, Social Sciences, Problematization, Social relevance, Application of science, Adaptation of science, Science’ origins.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on PhilPapers
  18. 213011.168891
    This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Natalja Deng's site
  19. 213250.16891
    In this article I expound an understanding of the quantum mechanics of so-called “indistinguishable” systems in which permutation invariance is taken as a symmetry of a special kind, namely the result of representational redundancy. This understanding has heterodox consequences for the understanding of the states of constituent systems in an assembly and for the notion of entanglement, and corrects the inter-theoretic relations between quantum mechanics and both classical particle mechanics and quantum field theory. The most striking of the heterodox consequences are: (i) that fermionic states ought not always to be considered entangled; (ii) it is possible for two fermions or two bosons to be discerned using purely monadic quantities; and that (iii) in fact fermions (but not bosons) may always be so discerned. I conclude with a discussion of a puzzling implication for the composition of fermionic systems.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Adam Caulton's site
  20. 213301.16893
    I am very grateful to Sebastian Gäb, Eva Schmidt and Michael Scott for their generous and thoughtful comments on my paper. While there are some significant differences of opinion, it was gratifying to find some points of agreement. In particular, each of them accepts that there is something to what I am calling the ‘puzzle’: the apparent failure, in paradigm cases of religious belief, to integrate one’s beliefs, and a common lack of concern with this among believers. Does the failure to integrate what one says and does show that we need to treat what are commonly called beliefs as different psychological phenomena? I do not pretend that this is a new question, or that I have a fully worked out answer, but I am happy that each of my commentators treats the question as a serious one. However, each contributor has criticisms of my proposals in the paper, and here I try to address them briefly.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  21. 214655.168952
    We distinguish between beliefs, the paradigm doxastic state, and the conscious episodes in which we acknowledge, judge or express our beliefs. Beliefs are mental states that govern our actions and are appropriately related to their conscious manifestations. When things go well, there is a kind of harmony between the underlying unconscious state and its conscious manifestations. What we consciously acknowledge or judge conforms to how we behave, and our underlying dispositions to behave and speak change as our interaction with the world changes.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  22. 214683.168968
    The stream of our consciousness includes many kinds of episodes. There are perceptual experiences and sensations, images and daydreams, sudden flashes of memories, feelings, and emotions. All of this seems very real: as we are going through these experiences, it’s hard to doubt that they exist. Of course, it’s a further and difficult question what their nature is, how we should grasp their tangible presence to our mind, but that is not our concern here. We will just note that at least prima facie, episodes in the stream of consciousness have a manifest character of reality, or (as we might say) factuality. Conscious episodes also include conscious thoughts, for example musing, reasoning, deliberations – often mixed with other kinds of episodes like emotions. Some philosophers think that the conscious character of thoughts is different from the conscious character of other kinds of episodes, because thought doesn’t have a phenomenal character. But that again is not our concern here. We just note that conscious thought, insofar as it is present to the mind, also seems to be manifestly real, or factual.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  23. 214705.168984
    Theorists commonly postulate unconscious mental states and processes but are unable to articulate what it means to be unconscious. We dispute the standard view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious mentality, and with it, the standard view of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. The second is to lay out several options for replacing the standard view, ones that allow for substantive differences between conscious and unconscious mentality. The third is to sketch the foundations of a unifying conception of the unconscious across the various disciplines which study the mind, focusing on the nature of interpretation and representation. Along the way, we apply these conjectures to examples of implicit cognition.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  24. 214749.169001
    It is a commonplace view in contemporary philosophy that commonsense psychology consists in explaining people’s behaviour in terms of their beliefs and desires. Familiar examples typically involve people going to the kitchen and getting something from the fridge, because they desired water (Zalabardo 2019), beer (Kriegel 2019, Smithies and Weiss 2019), wine (Crane 2003:186), yellow mango (Schroeder 2020) or something to eat (Fiebich and Michael 2015), and they believed that it was in the fridge.
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  25. 214771.169018
    Philosophers often defend their views by pointing to the unacceptability of what they take to be the only alternative. So, for example, materialists sometimes defend their view of the mind by contrasting it with the inadequacy of dualist views which treat the mind as an immaterial substance. The idea of immaterial substance is scientifically challenging, obscure, mysterious or even incoherent. This can be part of what moves them to accept a materialist view of the mind. Another case is the subject of this paper: the problem of non-existence. Many analytic philosophers construct their position in opposition to the view that we should explain thought and talk about the non-existent by appealing to a category of non-existent beings or entities. Here is an example of the kind of view they reject, which they usually attribute to Alexius Meinong (1853-1920): thoughts and sentences about the mythological winged horse Pegasus are explained in terms of reference to the non-existent entity, Pegasus. Pegasus does not exist, to be sure, but it must be an entity of some kind if we are to talk about it. However, the idea that there are entities which do not exist but have some kind of being is deeply peculiar. Don’t all these ideas — object, entity, existence, being, reality — come as a package? How can we really pull them apart?
    Found 2 days, 11 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  26. 218050.169034
    We would like to have a wide range of explanations for the behaviour of machine learning systems. However, how should we understand these explanations? Typically, attempts to clarify what an explanations for questions such as ’why am I getting this output for these inputs?’ have been approached from the philosophy of science, through an analogy with scientific (and often causal) explanations. I show that ML systems are best thought of as noncausal, specifically mathematical objects. We should therefore interpret these explanations differently, through analogy with mathematical explanations. I show that this still allows us to use much of the same theoretical apparatus, and argue that the asymmetry of many of the standard ML explanations can be accounted for in virtue of the link these systems have with concrete implementations.
    Found 2 days, 12 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  27. 218074.169048
    The relations between : reality in itself and phenomenal reality, mathematical world and world of experience, exactness and approximation in physics and mathematics, these are issues, among others, that invest both physics and philosophy. There is a vast area of intersection between physics and philosophy. The article is located precisely at this intersection. The headlines of the main topics addressed are : realism and phenomenalism in epistemology and physics, relation world of experience - mathematical world, eulogy of inexactness and therefore of approximation and probability. Furthermore, two quite original working hypotheses : a draft of a ‘theory of uniqueness, irreducibility and unrepeatability of the event’ and the criticism of substantialization, which attributes reality in itself to the objects of the cognitive process, with the consequent proposal for a ‘change of perspective’, which eases fundamental physics from epistemological assumptions and prejudices. Physics, even theoretical physics, is an experimental science. Physics does not exaust human thought, but its sphere and its effectiveness are exactly this.
    Found 2 days, 12 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  28. 218099.169066
    According to the standard Humean theory of the laws of nature, Lewis’ Best System Analysis (BSA), laws of nature have their status at least partly as the result of an optimal trade-off between scientific values such as simplicity and descriptive strength. This idea has recently come under pressure. Authors like Roberts and Woodward have pointed out that there might, pace what proponents of the BSAs like to suggest, be no such trade-off in the way laws of nature are identified in the natural sciences. Roberts has it that considerations of strength in theory choice are never compromised by simplicity considerations; and Woodward argues that choices between scientific theories and the associated laws often rather involve a threshold of descriptive strength which has to be met before simplicity can even begin to matter.
    Found 2 days, 12 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  29. 218125.169081
    Physicist Percy Bridgman has been taken by Heather Douglas to be an exemplar defender of an untenable value-free ideal for science. This picture is complicated by a detailed study of Bridgman’s philosophical views of the relation between science and society. The normative autonomy of science, a version of the value-free ideal, is defended. This restriction on the provenance of permissible values in science is given a basis in Bridgman’s broader philosophical commitments, most importantly, his view that science is primarily an individual commitment to a set of epistemic norms and values. Considerations of external moral or social values are not, on this view, intrinsic to scientific practice, though they have a broader pragmatic significance. What Bridgman takes as the proper relation between science and society is shown through analysis of his many writings on the topic and consideration of his rarely remarked upon involvement in the most problematic example of “Big Science” of his day: the atomic bomb. A reevaluation of Bridgman’s views provides a unique characterization of what is at stake in the values in science debate: the normative autonomy of science.
    Found 2 days, 12 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  30. 267752.169096
    According to MODERATISM, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges like <There is an external world>, <I am not a brain in a vat (BIV)>, and so on. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by combining the claim that external world propositions have a substantive truth property like correspondence with the claim that hinges have a deflationary truth property. I argue that the resulting view cannot offer a coherent characterization of ‘skeptical switch scenarios’ while providing an effective anti-skeptical strategy. In a more positive vein, I defend an approach that combines a correspondence conception of truth with epistemological disjunctivism. KEYWORDS. Epistemic justification; hinge epistemology; alethic pluralism; epistemological disjunctivism; skepticism.
    Found 3 days, 2 hours ago on PhilPapers