Philosophical Progress

Articles and blog posts found on 29 June 2025

2025-06-29T23:59:00Z

Enno Fischer: The Pursuitworthienss of Experiments (pdf, 9089 words)

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.

Ian Phillips: Cognitive Sciences (pdf, 1387 words)

The puzzle of aphantasia concerns how individuals reporting no visual imagery perform more-or-less normally on tasks presumed to depend on it [1]. In his splendid recent review in TiCS, Zeman [2] canvasses four ‘cognitive explanations’: (i) differences in description; (ii) ‘faulty introspection’; (iii) “unconscious or ‘sub-personal’ imagery”; and (iv) total lack of imagery. Difficulties beset all four. To make progress, we must recognize that imagery is a complex and multidimensional capacity and that aphantasia commonly reflects partial imagery loss with selective sparing. Specifically, I propose that aphantasia often involves a lack of visual-object imagery (explaining subjective reports and objective correlates) but selectively spared spatial imagery (explaining Some researchers have suggested that aphantasics may have failed to follow instructions or engage imagery [7]. This is unconvincing. In studies of galvanic skin responses, trials were excluded in which subjects failed to demonstrate ‘proper reading and comprehension’ of the frightening stories. Thus, it remains a mystery why spontaneous imagery did not emerge [6]. Similarly, in studies of pupillary light responses, aphantasics showed a characteristic in-task correlation between pupil and stimulus set size, indicating that they were not “‘refusing’ to actively participate…due to…a belief that they are unable to imagine” [5]. Aphantasics also do voluntarily form images in other tasks despite a lack of incentives [8].

Irina Spiegel: The Possibility of a General Theory of Normativity in Light of the Number-Counts-Debate (pdf, 10315 words)

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. Welfarism^min 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 welfarism^min approach and suggests a possible alternative for more adequately addressing the Taurek problem.

Ryan O'Loughlin, Daniele Visioni: When Are Small-Scale Field Experiments in Solar Geoengineering Worth Pursuing? (pdf, 10593 words)

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).

Articles and blog posts found on 28 June 2025

2025-06-28T23:59:00Z

Georgi Gardiner: Purism and Pluralism: On the Brilliance of Tarot and the Breadth of Epistemology (pdf, 6522 words)

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.

Mahmoud Jalloh: Maxwell, Peirce, and Planck: The Quest for Absolute Measurement and Absolute Reality (pdf, 5580 words)

People are often interested in physics due to its purported objectivity. It aims to truly be a study of nature (φύσεις) in itself. On the other hand, physics is a human construct, a language we use to describe the world as we experience it. In our quest for absolute reality, then, it seems that we must rid our description of the world of all subjectivity. This lecture concerns part of a story of such an attempt: the quest for absolute measurement. We will consider physical and philosophical aspects of the attempts of Maxwell, Peirce, and Planck to rid our language of physical measurement of undue subjectivity. This will shed some light on the possibility of knowing absolute reality—and the possibility of communication with aliens.

Rupert Smith: Misrepresenting the Hole Argument? (pdf, 4321 words)

Key elements of the recent dialectic surrounding the hole argument in the philosophy of general relativity are clarified by close attendance to the nature of scientific representation. I argue that a structuralist account of representation renders the purported haecceitistic differences between target systems irrelevant to the representational role of models of general relativity. Framing the hole argument in this way helps resolve the impasse in the literature between Weatherall and Pooley and Read.

Wendy S. Parker: An intermediate approach to value management (pdf, 6056 words)

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.

The Archimedean Point: The Irrationality of the Political (Pt. 2) (html, 2441 words)

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. …

Good Thoughts: Meta-Metaethical Realism (html, 141 words)

The EA Forum is currently hosting a fun debate (courtesy of) over whether morality is objective. Many of the anti-realists seem to find it mysterious how there could be a fact of the matter as to which fundamental normative standards are correct. …

Articles and blog posts found on 27 June 2025

2025-06-27T23:59:00Z

Richard Johns: Causality and Determination: the order of existence (pdf, 5574 words)

In this paper I develop a view of token causation that is inspired by Anscombe’s Causality and Determination, and is likely what she meant by “causality consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes”. On this view, token causation is not a logical relation, even in a very broad sense, and so is very different from logical consequence, conditional probability, and counterfactual dependence. Instead, causation is a kind of ontological dependence, so that to cause something means to confer existence on it. Causation is thus absent from physics, but I argue that recognising this absence enables us to make sense of the direction of time and the stability of physical probabilities.

Articles and blog posts found on 26 June 2025

2025-06-26T23:59:00Z

Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag, Michael T. Hicks: The normative force of natural laws: Humean and non-Humean accounts of nomic normativity (pdf, 12256 words)

The debate about laws of nature mainly focuses on the laws’ connection to regularities and modal facts. The much-discussed inference problem concerns why ‘it is a law that p’ entails ‘p’. Another problem (the ‘modality problem’) is about the need to explain the laws’ relation to counterfactuals, causation, and dispositions. In this paper, we argue that a third problem, the ‘normativity problem’, should play an equally important role in the debate: A theory of laws needs to explain the laws’ distinctive significance for what agents ought to do and believe. We argue that, just like the other two problems, the normativity problem poses distinct challenges for Humeans and non-Humeans and that it should be taken into account when comparing different views of laws.

Eleanor March, James Read: Review of "The Classification of General Affine Connections in Newton-Cartan Geometry: Towards Metric-Affine Newton-Cartan Gravity", by Philip K. Schwartz (pdf, 2279 words)

In recent years, there has been heightened interest in (at least) two threads regarding geometrical aspects of spacetime theories. On the one hand, physicists have explored a richer space of relativistic spacetime structures than that of general relativity, in which the conditions both of torsion-freeness and of metric compatibility are relaxed—this has led to the study of so-called ‘metricaffine theories’ of gravitation, on which see e.g. Hehl et al. (1995) for a masterly review. On the other hand, physicists have been increasingly interested in securing a rigorous and fully general understanding of the non-relativistic limit of general relativity—this has to novel version of Newtonian physics, potentially with spacetime torsion (‘Type II’ Newton–Cartan theory—see Hansen et al. (2022) for a systematic overview).

Jon Perez Laraudogoitia: How the tortoise can beat Achilles: a paradox on curves of infinite length (pdf, 2840 words)

Achilles and the tortoise compete in a race where the beginning (the start) is at point O and end (the finish) is at point P. At all times the tortoise can run at a speed that is a fraction  of Achilles' speed at most (with  being a positive real number lower than 1, 0 <  < 1), and both start the race at t = 0 at O. If the trajectory joining O with P is a straight line, Achilles will obviously win every time. It is easy to prove that there is a trajectory joining O and P along which the tortoise has a strategy to win every time, reaching the finish before Achilles.

Michael McKenna: A timid response to the consequence argument (pdf, 9199 words)

In this paper, I challenge the Consequence Argument for Incompatibilism by arguing that the inference principle it relies upon is not well motivated. The sorts of non-question-begging instances that might be offered in support of it fall short.

Michael Mckenna: Facing the Luck Problem for Compatibilists (pdf, 11676 words)

It is commonplace to note that libertarians about free will face a compatibility problem of their own. Indeterminism appears to be at odds with freedom rather than a condition for it, since it injects only chance or luck into the etiology of action. This problem, the luck problem, is widely regarded as unique to libertarians. However, this is false. Compatibilists face the same luck problem that animates libertarians. In this paper, I set out what the luck problem is and why compatibilists face it too. I then show that the most natural resources one might think a compatibilist should use to solve the problem are insufficient. I close with a proposal for compatibilists.

Alexander Pruss's Blog: A failed Deep Thought (html, 267 words)

I was going to post the following as Deep Thoughts XLIII, in a series of posts meant to be largely tautologous or at least trivial statements: - Everyone older than you was once your age. And then I realized that this is not actually a tautology. …

Bet On It: The Hidden Constraints on HOT Lanes (html, 622 words)

Bryan here. Last month, I blogged on “The Strange Economics of HOT Lanes.” Today, my co-author Zixuan Ma argues that two little-known regulations explain why “overpricing” is plausibly profit-maximizing after all. …

Articles and blog posts found on 25 June 2025

2025-06-25T23:59:00Z

Shan Gao: Global Branching and Everettian Probability: A Critique of Sebens and Carroll’s Proposal (pdf, 4265 words)

Sebens and Carroll (2018) propose that self-locating uncertainty, constrained by their Epistemic Separability Principle (ESP), derives Born rule probabilities in Everettian quantum mechanics. Their global branching model, however, leads to local amplitudes lost, undermining this derivation. This paper argues that global branching’s premature splitting of observers, such as Bob in an EPR-Bohm setup, yields local pure states devoid of amplitude coefficients essential for Born rule probabilities. Despite their innovative framework, further issues with global branching—conflicts with decoherence, relativistic violations via physical state changes, and constraints on superposition measurements—render it empirically inadequate. Defenses, such as invoking global amplitudes, fail to resolve these flaws. Additionally, observer-centric proofs of the Born rule neglect objective statistics, weakening their empirical grounding. This analysis underscores the need to reconsider branching mechanisms to secure a robust foundation for Everettian probabilities.

ThEodoRE ARAbATziS: History of Science and Its Interlocutors in the Humanities (pdf, 8178 words)

▼ 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.

Wolfgang Schwarz: Dynamic Rationality and Disproportionate Belief (pdf, 11241 words)

I argue that rationality does not always require proportioning one’s beliefs to one’s evidence. I consider cases in which an agent’s evidence deteriorates over time, revealing less about the world or the agent’s location than their earlier evidence. I claim that the agent should retain beliefs that were supported by the earlier evidence, even if they are no longer supported by the later evidence. Failing to do so would violate an attractive principle of epistemic conservatism; it would foreseeably decrease the accuracy of the agent’s beliefs; it would make the agent susceptible to simple Dutch Books; it would allow them to manipulate their evidence to increase their confidence in desirable propositions over which they have no control. I defend the background assumption that dynamic considerations are relevant to epistemic rationality.

Alexander Pruss's Blog: Punishment, causation and time (html, 538 words)

I want to argue for this thesis: - For a punishment P for a fault F to be right, P must stand in a causal-like relation to P. What is a causal-like relation? Well, causation is a causal-like relation. …

Good Thoughts: The Moral Gadfly's Double-Bind (html, 1273 words)

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. …

Articles and blog posts found on 24 June 2025

2025-06-24T23:59:00Z

Massimiliano Carrara, Giorgio Lando: Mereomodal partialhood and fractional counting (pdf, 15577 words)

When we count, we often count fractions, too. We contend that fractional counting involves partial entities, which are merely possible parts of entities of the counted kind. The size of these possible parts is measured with respect to the size of a possible member of that kind. Therefore, partialhood is mereomodal, and the logical form of fractional counting claims includes mereological predicates, modal operators, and a measurement functor. Different varieties of modality and forms of measurement are involved, depending on the kinds of entities to be counted and the context. The mereomodal account validates the idea that fractional counting is a way of counting by identity, in continuity with logic-based accounts of non-fractional counting, albeit more complex than them. Such an account also explains why some kinds of entities are not involved in partialhood and cannot be fractionally counted, while others only have marginal involvement in these phenomena. In the last part, we discuss some difficult cases and show that an integrity condition for partial entities is required in the logical form of some fractional counting claims.

Michael Bergmann: Could Darwinian Natural Selection Be Divinely Guided? (pdf, 4362 words)

This article defends the compatibility of evolutionary theory and religious belief against the objection that God could not have intentionally brought humans into existence given that the evolutionary process by which humans came into existence crucially involves random genetic mutation. The thought behind the objection is that a process cannot be both random and intended by God to unfold as it does.

Bet On It: Solipsism>>Determinism (html, 876 words)

I have long believed in what philosophers call “libertarian free will.” This isn’t about political philosophy, but philosophy of mind. Holding all physical conditions constant, determinism holds that there is exactly one thing that I can do. …

Scott Aaronson's blog: Raymond Laflamme (1960-2025) (html, 1344 words)

Even with everything happening in the Middle East right now, even with (relatedly) everything happening in my own family (my wife and son sheltering in Tel Aviv as Iranian missiles rained down), even with all the rather ill-timed travel I’ve found myself doing as these events unfolded (Ecuador and the Galapagos and now STOC’2025 in Prague) … there’s been another thing, a huge one, weighing on my soul. …

Articles and blog posts found on 23 June 2025

2025-06-23T23:59:00Z

Alisa Bokulich: Models and Analogies in the Reconstruction of Extinct Life (pdf, 12049 words)

How can we reconstruct what long extinct animals, such as dinosaurs, looked like, how fast they moved, and what ecological role they played in their paleoenvironment? These features are not preserved in the fossil record, so paleontologists must instead turn to scientifically informed models and analogies to try to answer these questions. In her celebrated book Models and Analogies in Science, Mary Hesse illustrates the concept of material analogy using the examples of homologies and analogies in biology. These two types of analogy have given rise to two different research programs in the project of reconstructing extinct life: the Phylogenetic Approach and the Functional Morphology Approach. In this chapter I show how each of these approaches has its own strengths and weaknesses, and argue instead for an Integrated Approach that makes use of both of Hesse’s types of analogy. I conclude by highlighting the importance of paying attention to model uncertainty, adequacy-for-purpose, and the whole organism in a paleoreconstruction.

David Owens: Command and Obedience (pdf, 10660 words)

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.

Fermin Fulda: Naturalizing Biological Agency: Constitutive and Dynamical Strategies (pdf, 11820 words)

The view that organisms are agents—and that organismal agency is fundamental to explaining biological phenomena—has become a central topic in the philosophy of biology (Walsh 2015; Moreno & Mossio 2015; Corning et al. 2023). Unlike standard causal-mechanical approaches, however, the concept of agency carries distinct teleological and normative implications that must be naturalized to be scientifically legitimate. But what exactly does naturalism require? And what counts as an adequate naturalization? I propose two desiderata: causal-location and explanatory indispensability, and compare two naturalistic accounts of agency—the organizational or constitutive account (OA) (Moreno & Mossio 2015) and the ecological or dynamical account (EA) (Walsh 2015). I argue that while OA satisfies causal-location at the cost of explanatory adequacy, EA achieves explanatory adequacy while remaining silent on causal-location. This leads to a dilemma between causal reductionism (OA) and teleological primitivism (EA), rooted in differing criteria for what naturalism requires. I distinguish two increasingly demanding grades of scientific naturalism: scientific emergentism and scientific essentialism, and argue that the dilemma arises from OA’s commitment to the latter and EA’s to the former. I conclude by showing how the emergentist criterion can resolve the dilemma by integrating OA and EA into a two-stage strategy that satisfies both desiderata.

Isaac Record: Ways of Worldfaking: Identifying the Threat and Harm of Synthetic Media (pdf, 3991 words)

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.

Rachel S. Rubinstein: How and When Do Individuating Information and Social Category Information Influence Implicit Judgments of Individual Members of Known Social Groups? A Review (pdf, 13409 words)

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.

Ricardo Muciño, Elias Okon, Daniel Sudarsky, Martín Wiedemann: Fully Self-Consistent Semiclassical Gravity (pdf, 8343 words)

A theory of quantum gravity consists of a gravitational framework which, unlike general relativity, takes into account the quantum character of matter. In spite of impressive advances, no fully satisfactory, self-consistent and empirically viable theory with those characteristics has ever been constructed. A successful semiclassical gravity model, in which the classical Einstein tensor couples to the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor of quantum matter fields, would, at the very least, constitute a useful stepping stone towards quantum gravity. However, not only no empirically viable semiclassical theory has ever been proposed, but the self-consistency of semiclassical gravity itself has been called into question repeatedly over the years. Here, we put forward a fully self-consistent, empirically viable semiclassical gravity framework, in which the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor of a quantum field, evolving via a relativistic objective collapse dynamics, couples to a fully classical Einstein tensor. We present the general framework, a concrete example, and briefly explore possible empirical consequences of our model.

Tanner Leighton: Quantum Theory and Novel Scientific Language: Defending a Pragmatist View (pdf, 6743 words)

This paper advocates for a pragmatist view on quantum theory, offering a response to David Wallace’s recent criticisms of Richard Healey’s quantum pragmatism. In particular, I challenge Wallace’s general claim that quantum pragmatists—and anti-representationalists more broadly— lack the resources to make sense of the novel ‘quantum’ language used throughout modern physics in applications of quantum theory. I then show how a novel way of viewing our current best physics and the relation between quantum and classical theories follows from the pragmatist view advanced in this paper.

Tanner Leighton: Representationalism and Quantum Mechanics: An Irenic-Pragmatist View (pdf, 18910 words)

The pragmatist philosophy of language has undergone a significant revival in recent decades, emerging as a compelling alternative to the traditional representationalist view of language and its relation to thought and reality. Richard Rorty was instrumental in this resurgence, advancing his ‘neo-pragmatism’ as a radical, global anti-representationalism. Building on Rorty’s work, Robert Brandom and Huw Price have each developed distinct neo-pragmatist frameworks, refining and adapting his ideas in their own analytic vocabularies and presenting them in a less confrontational, more conciliatory tone. This chapter aims to advance this conciliatory tradition by offering a new vision of neo-pragmatism as an irenic—common-ground-seeking—approach to the philosophy of language, which I term irenic pragmatism.