Philosophical Progresshttp://www.philosophicalprogress.org/2024-03-18T23:59:00ZArticles and blog posts found on 18 March 20242024-03-18T23:59:00Z2024-03-18T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-18://<b>Andreas Bengtson: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/BENIDH.pdf">Is Discrimination Harmful?</a></b> (pdf, 4313 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Andreas Elpidorou: <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55a1643de4b04267aaedc13d/t/65f853983e323e2216155f40/1710773144734/04_Elpidorou.pdf">The Nature and Value of Boredom</a></b> (pdf, 11592 words)<br /> <div>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.).</div><br />
<b>Elliott Thornley: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/THOAND-4.pdf">A Non-Identity Dilemma for Person-Affecting Views</a></b> (pdf, 8147 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Elmar Unnsteinsson: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/UNNTAA-2.pdf">Talking About: A Response to Bowker, Keiser, Michaelson</a></b> (pdf, 12763 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>J. Adam Carter, Robert Cowan: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/CARSAD-5.pdf">Safety and Dream Scepticism in Sosa’s Epistemology</a></b> (pdf, 15073 words)<br /> <div>A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, <i>unsafe knowledge</i>. 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 <i>animal/reflective</i> knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of <i>dream scepticism</i>, and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter <i>dreaming response</i> 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.</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/simplicity-and-newtons-inverse-square.html">Simplicity and Newton's inverse square law</a></b> (html, 314 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/beauty-and-simplicity-in-equations.html">Beauty and simplicity in equations</a></b> (html, 186 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>Mostly Aesthetics: <a href="https://mostly.substack.com/p/side-note-the-documentary-fallacy">Side Note: The Documentary Fallacy Fallacy</a></b> (html, 766 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>Bet On It: <a href="https://www.betonit.ai/p/out-of-state-tuition-is-out-of-this">Out-of-State Tuition Is Out of this World</a></b> (html, 869 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>D. G. Mayo's blog: <a href="https://errorstatistics.com/2024/03/17/preregistration-promises-and-pitfalls-continued/">Preregistration, promises and pitfalls, continued</a></b> (html, 2709 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
Articles and blog posts found on 17 March 20242024-03-17T23:59:00Z2024-03-17T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-17://<b>Todd M. Stewart: <a href="https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/fpphil/article/1014/&path_info=Stewart_2023_Grazer_edited.pdf">When Is a Belief Formed in an Epistemically Circular Way?</a></b> (pdf, 7583 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
Articles and blog posts found on 16 March 20242024-03-16T23:59:00Z2024-03-16T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-16://<b>Adam Caulton: <a href="https://adamcaulton.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/qualindsep2013.pdf">Individuation, entanglement and composition in permutation-invariant quantum mechanics</a></b> (pdf, 35762 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Mahmoud Jalloh: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23202/1/BridgmanBomb.pdf">Bridgman and the Normative Independence of Science: An Individual Physicist in the Shadow of the Bomb</a></b> (pdf, 12608 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Michael Strevens: <a href="https://www.strevens.org/research/lux/SciKatalepsis.pdf">Grasp and Scientific Understanding: A Recognition Account</a></b> (pdf, 11258 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Natalja Deng: <a href="https://nataljadeng.weebly.com/uploads/9/6/8/2/96826966/deng_latham_miller___norton_theres_no_time_like_the_present_-_present-bias_temporal_attitudes_and_temporal_ontology.docx">There’s No Time Like the Present: Present-bias, Temporal Attitudes and Temporal Ontology</a></b> (doc, 13585 words)<br /> <div>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 <i>ontology</i>; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative <i>movement</i> in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation.</div><br />
<b>Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23200/1/LinnemannMichels_HumeanismTradeoff.pdf">Laws of nature as results of a trade-off -- Rethinking the Humean trade-off conception</a></b> (pdf, 9776 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Phil Corkum: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/CORAOT-10.pdf">Aristotle on the Individuation of Syllogisms</a></b> (pdf, 10727 words)<br /> <div>Discussion of the Aristotelian syllogism over the last sixty years has arguably <i>centered</i> on the question whether syllogisms are inferences or implications. But the <i>significance</i> of this debate at times has been taken to concern whether the syllogistic is a logic or a theory, and how it ought to be represented by modern systems.</div><br />
<b>Pier Sandro Scano: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23193/1/The%20fifth%20Solvay%20Congress.pdf">The fifth Solvay Congress really over or still open
Between Physics and Philosophy</a></b> (pdf, 7641 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>S. M. Reza Amiri Tehrani: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/AMIAEA-2.pdf"> An Epistemological Analysis of the Challenge of Social Sciences' Deficiency in Iran</a></b> (pdf, 8400 words)<br /> <div>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<sub>.</sub> <b>Keywords:</b> Humanities, Social Sciences, Problematization, Social relevance, Application of science, Adaptation of science, Science’ origins.</div><br />
<b>Santiago Echeverri: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/ECHMAT-2.pdf">Moderatism and Truth</a></b> (pdf, 10828 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Stefan Buijsman: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23201/1/Machine_Learning_models_as_Mathematics.pdf">Machine Learning models as Mathematics: interpreting explainable AI in non-causal terms</a></b> (pdf, 8630 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/crane_intentionality_replies_to_critics_draft.pdf"></a></b> (pdf, 4385 words)<br /> <div>The overall point of the target article is to criticise the idea that any theory of intentionality must answer the ‘question of aboutness’: <i>what makes it that case that any mental state can represent anything at all?</i> 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’.</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/replies_to_ga%CC%88b_schmidt_and_scott.pdf">Replies to Gäb, Schmidt and Scott on Religious Belief</a></b> (pdf, 2201 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/crane_exotica_2023.pdf">Exotica</a></b> (pdf, 7626 words)<br /> <div>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?</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane, J. Robert Thompson: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/unconscious_mentality_and_implicit_cognition_draft.pdf">Implicit Cognition and Unconscious Mentality</a></b> (pdf, 7410 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane, Katalin Farkas: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/crane___farkas_limits_of_the_doxastic.pdf">The Limits of the Doxastic</a></b> (pdf, 9234 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane, Katalin Farkas: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/crane___farkas_mental_fact___mental_fiction.pdf">Mental Fact and Mental Fiction</a></b> (pdf, 8361 words)<br /> <div>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.</div><br />
<b>Tim Crane, Katalin Farkas: <a href="http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/crane_and_farkas_lack_of_attitude_final.pdf">Lack of Attitude</a></b> (pdf, 7656 words)<br /> <div>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 <i>desired</i> 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 <i>believed</i> that it was in the fridge.</div><br />
<b>Mostly Aesthetics: <a href="https://mostly.substack.com/p/on-toleration">On Toleration</a></b> (html, 874 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>Bet On It: <a href="https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-rct-agenda">The RCT Agenda</a></b> (html, 1358 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>The Archimedean Point: <a href="https://cyrilhedoin.substack.com/p/the-machine-process-the-fear-of-redundancy">The Machine Process, the Fear of Redundancy, and the End of Politics</a></b> (html, 1630 words)<br /> <div>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. …</div><br />
<b>Good Thoughts: <a href="https://rychappell.substack.com/p/voting-systems-for-academic-departments">Voting Systems for Academic Departments</a></b> (html, 593 words)<br /> <div>What’s the best way for a department to make hiring (or other contentious but important) decisions? Some take a simple vote between the final-stage candidates, perhaps followed by a run-off between the top two. …</div><br />
Articles and blog posts found on 15 March 20242024-03-15T23:59:00Z2024-03-15T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-15://<b>Niels Linnemann, Chris Smeenk, Mark Robert Baker: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23196/1/LinnemannSmeenkBaker_Spin2paper_v2.pdf">GR as a classical spin-2 theory?</a></b> (pdf, 5258 words)<br /> <div>The self-interaction spin-2 approach to general relativity (GR) has been extremely influential in the particle physics community. Leaving no doubt regarding its heuristic value, we argue that a view of the metric field of GR as nothing but a stand-in for a self-coupling field in flat spacetime runs into a dilemma: either the view is physically incomplete in so far as it requires recourse to GR after all, or it leads to an absurd multiplication of alternative viewpoints on GR rendering any understanding of the metric field as nothing but a spin-2 field in flat spacetime unjustified.</div><br />
<b>Saakshi Dulani: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23197/1/S.Dulani_Dissertation_Post%20Online.pdf">Black Hole Paradoxes: A Unified Framework for Information Loss</a></b> (pdf, 66088 words)<br /> <div>The black hole information loss paradox is a catch-all term for a family of puzzles related to black hole evaporation. For almost 50 years, the quest to elucidate the implications of black hole evaporation has not only sustained momentum, but has also become increasingly populated with proposals that seem to generate more questions than they purport to answer. Scholars often neglect to acknowledge ongoing discussions within black hole thermodynamics and statistical mechanics when analyzing the paradox, including the interpretation of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, which is far from settled. To remedy the dialectical gridlock, I have formulated an overarching, unified framework, which I call “Black Hole Paradoxes”, that integrates the debates and taxonomizes the relevant ‘camps’ or philosophical positions.</div><br />
<b>Samuela Marchiori, Kevin Scharp: <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10676-024-09749-7.pdf">What is conceptual disruption?</a></b> (pdf, 11583 words)<br /> <div>Recent work on philosophy of technology emphasises the ways in which technology can disrupt our concepts and conceptual schemes. We analyse and challenge existing accounts of conceptual disruption, criticising views according to which conceptual disruption can be understood in terms of uncertainty for conceptual application, as well as views assuming all instances of conceptual disruption occur at the same level. We proceed to provide our own account of conceptual disruption as an interruption in the normal functioning of concepts and conceptual schemes. Moreover, we offer a multilevel taxonomy thereof, where we distinguish between instances of conceptual disruptions occurring at different levels (conceptual scheme, conceptual clusters, and individual concepts), taking on different forms (conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts), and leading to different degrees of severity (extending from mild to severe). We also provide detailed accounts through historical examples of how conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts can occur at different times in the very same process of conceptual disruption. Finally, we make the case that different kinds of conceptual engineering can provide meaningful ways to assess and overcome distinct types of conceptual disruption.</div><br />
<b>The Brains Blog: <a href="https://philosophyofbrains.com/2024/03/15/wu-movements-of-the-mind-post-5-deducing-and-introspecting.aspx">Wu, Movements of the Mind. Post 5: Deducing and Introspecting</a></b> (html, 1163 words)<br /> <div>(See all posts in this series here.) I conclude with Chapters 6 and 7 of the book, which apply the theory to reasoning and introspecting consciousness. Investigating these as forms of attending, mental actions, illuminates. …</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-tweak-to-turing-test.html">A tweak to the Turing test</a></b> (html, 809 words)<br /> <div>The Turing test for machine thought has an interrogator communicate (by typing) with a human and a machine both of which try to convince the interrogator that they are human. The interrogator then guesses which is human. …</div><br />
<b>The Archimedean Point: <a href="https://cyrilhedoin.substack.com/p/the-iron-cage-20">The Iron Cage 2.0</a></b> (html, 1556 words)<br /> <div>Aaron Ross Powell has an interesting essay about the arguments against the use of AI to create “intellectual” content such as art or pieces of writing. Powell identifies three such arguments:
“The most common arguments against the use of LLM technology—the chatbots like ChatGPT that produce text from a prompt, or the image generators like Midjourney that produce visual works—take a few forms. …</div><br />
<b>Azimuth: <a href="https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/the-probability-of-undecidability/">The Probability of Undecidability</a></b> (html, 337 words)<br /> <div>There’s a lot we don’t know. There’s a lot we can’t know. But can we at least know how much we can’t know? What fraction of mathematical statements are undecidable—that is, can be neither proved nor disproved? …</div><br />
<b>Tristan Haze's blog: <a href="http://sprachlogik.blogspot.com/2024/03/in-what-sense-can-classical-logic-be.html">In what sense can classical logic be wrong?</a></b> (html, 657 words)<br /> <div>Failing to capture stuff is not being wrong, so for e.g. indicative conditionals not being material conditionals does not mean that classical logic is wrong, only that it doesn’t by itself handle the validity or otherwise of arguments involving indicative conditionals. …</div><br />
Articles and blog posts found on 14 March 20242024-03-14T23:59:00Z2024-03-14T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-14://<b>Alastair Wilson: <a href="https://alastairwilson.org/files/meahlnweb.pdf">Metaphysical Emergence as Higher-Level Naturalness</a></b> (pdf, 6069 words)<br /> <div>In this chapter I explore an approach to metaphysical emergence which distinguishes between fundamentality and naturalness and endorsing the thesis that there are natural properties at non-fundamental levels. I take as my starting point Elizabeth Barnes’s proposal to characterize the emergent as fundamental but dependent, criticizing it on the ground that it undermines the theoretical work we need fundamentality to do. However, I think Barnes is on the right track: emergence is linked to a selective metaphysical privileging of higher-level subject-matters. I suggest an alternative account of the metaphysically emergent as non-fundamental but (at least relatively) <i>natural</i>, and show how this suggestion can be implemented in a simple subject-matter-based framework.</div><br />
<b>Davide Fassio, Jie Gao: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/FASCSI.pdf">Cross-linguistic Studies in Epistemology</a></b> (pdf, 5072 words)<br /> <div>Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Linguistic methods popular amongst philosophers include linguistic tests, standard and comparative semantic analysis, testing language usage and use frequency with the help of language corpora, and the study of syntactical structures and etymologies. Epistemologists have applied linguistic methods to a wide range of philosophical issues, including epistemic contextualism, epistemic norms of assertion and practical reasoning, the nature of know-how, whether beliefs are states or performances, whether belief is a weak or a strong attitude, and what kind of gradability is instantiated by theoretical rationality and epistemic justification. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology.</div><br />
<b>Ilker Yildirim, L.A. Paul: <a href="https://lapaul.org/papers/From%20task%20structures%20to%20world%20models.pdf">From task structures to world models: what do LLMs know?</a></b> (pdf, 8496 words)<br /> <div>In what sense does a large language model (LLM) have knowledge? We answer by granting LLMs ‘instrumental knowledge’: knowledge gained by using next-word generation as an instrument. We then ask how instrumental knowledge is related to the ordinary, ‘worldly knowledge’ exhibited by humans, and explore this question in terms of the degree to which instrumental knowledge can be said to incorporate the structured world models of cognitive science. We discuss ways LLMs could recover degrees of worldly knowledge and suggest that such recovery will be governed by an implicit, resource-rational tradeoff between world models and tasks. Our answer to this question extends beyond the capabilities of a particular AI system and challenges assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence.</div><br />
<b>Jacob Berger, Myrto Mylopoulos: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/BERHAH-9.docx">HOTT and Heavy: Higher-Order Thought Theory and the Theory-Heavy Approach to Animal Consciousness</a></b> (doc, 10821 words)<br /> <div>According to what Birch (2022) calls the theory-heavy approach to investigating nonhuman-animal consciousness, we select one of the well-developed theories of consciousness currently debated within contemporary cognitive science and investigate whether animals exhibit the neural structures or cognitive abilities posited by that theory as sufficient for consciousness. Birch argues, however, that this approach is in general problematic because it faces what he dubs the dilemma of demandingness— roughly, that we cannot use theories that are based on the human case to assess consciousness in nonhuman animals and <i>vice versa</i>. We argue here that, though this dilemma may problematize the application of many current accounts of consciousness to nonhuman animals, it does not challenge the use of standard versions of the higher-order thought theory (“HOTT”) of consciousness, according to which a creature is in a conscious mental state just in case it is aware of being in that state via a suitable higher-order thought (“HOT”). We show this in two ways. First, we argue that, unlike many extant theories of consciousness, HOTT is typically motivated by a commonsense, and more importantly, neutral condition on consciousness that applies to humans and animals alike. Second, we offer new empirical and theoretical reasons to think that many nonhuman animals possess the relevant HOTs necessary for consciousness. Considering these issues not only reveals the explanatory power of HOTT and some of its advantages over rival accounts, but also enables us to further extend and clarify the theory.</div><br />
<b>Jeremy Wyatt, Joseph Ulatowski: <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s44204-024-00148-9.pdf">Looking across languages: Anglocentrism, cross-linguistic experimental philosophy, and the future of inquiry about truth</a></b> (pdf, 12448 words)<br /> <div>Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property <i>truth</i>. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that <i>cross-linguistic experimental philosophy</i> has an indispensable yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field.</div><br />
<b>Jie Gao: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/GAOVOP.pdf">Varieties of Pragmatic Encroachment</a></b> (pdf, 4855 words)<br /> <div>According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards <i>p</i> has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the agent. Depending on such factors, a belief may count as justified or as knowledge in some circumstances but not in others. Pragmatic encroachment is typically contrasted with purism, according to which the epistemic status of an individual depends exclusively on truth-relevant factors, such as the quantity and quality of evidence or the reliability of belief-forming methods. Pragmatic encroachment comes in many varieties. This survey article provides an overview of different kinds of pragmatic encroachment (hereafter, PE). It focuses on three dimensions under which kinds of PE differ: the type of epistemic status affected by practical factors (§1), the type of practical factors affecting the epistemic status (§2), and the type of normative considerations encroaching on the epistemic status (§3).</div><br />
<b>Jie Gao: <a href="https://jiegaophil.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/0/8/50082855/belief_knowledge_and_practical_matters_edited.pdf">Belief, Knowledge and Practical Matters</a></b> (pdf, 86010 words)<br /> <div>For much of the twentieth century, most epistemologists held views according to which the epistemic realm is independent of the practical realm, and epistemic concepts are independent from practical ones. This ‘purist’ orthodoxy has been challenged since the beginning of the twenty-first century. According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards<i> p</i> has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the subject. Depending on such factors, a belief may count as justified or as knowledge in some circumstances but not in others. Among the many varieties of pragmatic encroachment, encroachment on knowledge is one of the most important and controversial.</div><br />
<b>M. Scarfone: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/SCAEDA-2.pdf">Evolutionary Debunking and the Folk/Theoretical Distinction</a></b> (pdf, 10364 words)<br /> <div>In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue that this in turn illuminates the proper scope of the evolutionary debunking argument, but not in an obvious way: it is a very specific type of undermining argument that targets those theories where theoretical judgments are inferred merely from folk judgments. One upshot of this conclusion is that it reveals a verboten methodology in metaethics. The evolutionary debunking argument is therefore much less powerful than its proponents have supposed, but it nevertheless rules out what is perhaps a common way of attempting to justify moral judgments.</div><br />
<b>Nathan Salmon: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/SALFEV-2.pdf">Fictitious Existence versus Nonexistence</a></b> (pdf, 4975 words)<br /> <div>A correct observation to the effect that <i>a</i> does not exist, where the ‘<i>a</i>’ is a singular term, could be true on any of a variety of grounds. Typically, a true, singular negative existential is true on the unproblematic ground that the subject term ‘<i>a</i>’ designates something that does not presently exist. More interesting philosophically is a singular, negative existential statement in which the subject term ‘<i>a</i>’ designates nothing at all. Both of these contrast sharply with a singular, negative existential in which the subject term is a name from fiction. I argue that such singular, negative existential statements are false. My account of fictional characters differs significantly from Kripke’s. It is shown that an objection to my account rests on a crucial misunderstanding. Finally, a crucial aspect of the account is emphasized.</div><br />
<b>Tim Kearl, Christopher Willard-Kyle: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/KEAECQ.pdf">Epistemic Cans</a></b> (pdf, 6736 words)<br /> <div>: We argue that S is in a position to know that p iff S can know that p. Thus, what makes position-to-know-ascriptions true is just a special case of what makes ability-ascriptions true: compossibility. The novelty of our compossibility theory of epistemic modality lies in its subsuming epistemic modality under agentive modality, the modality characterizing what agents can do.</div><br />
<b>The Brains Blog: <a href="https://philosophyofbrains.com/2024/03/14/wu-movements-of-mind-post-4-biased-attention-as-implicit-automatic-bias.aspx">Wu, Movements of Mind. Post 4: Biased Attention as Implicit, Automatic Bias.</a></b> (html, 936 words)<br /> <div>(See all posts in this series here.) Philosophers have been debating implicit biases for some time. In Chapter 5 of MoM, I argue that automatic attention provides a scrutable type of implicit bias, scrutable because we understand well automatic attention across various domains and the automatic biases that engender it. …</div><br />
Articles and blog posts found on 13 March 20242024-03-13T23:59:00Z2024-03-13T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-13://<b>Christian Tarsney, Teruji Thomas, William MacAskill: <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-decision-uncertainty/">Moral Decision-Making Under Uncertainty</a></b> (html, 16492 words)<br /> <div>Many important debates in contemporary ethics centre on idealized
thought experiments in which agents are assumed to have perfect
information about the effects of their actions and other morally
relevant features of the choices they face. If Abe turns the trolley,
one person will certainly be killed; if he does not, five people will
certainly be killed (Foot 1967); how the one and the five got into
that situation, whether blamelessly or recklessly (Thomson 1976:
210–11), is also a matter of certainty. If Betty conceives a
child now, it will certainly have a life that is hard but worth
living, while if she waits, her child’s life will certainly be
better—and the two choices will certainly result in
<i>different</i> children being born (Parfit 1984: 358).</div><br />
<b>Dilwyn Knox: <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bruno/">Giordano Bruno</a></b> (html, 22500 words)<br /> <div>Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was one of the most adventurous
thinkers of the Renaissance. Supremely confident in his intellectual
abilities, he ridiculed Aristotelianism, especially its contemporary
adherents. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory provided a starting
point for his exposition of what he called a “new
philosophy”. It disproved the axioms of Aristotelian natural
philosophy, notably the idea that sublunary elements occupied or
strove to return to their natural places, that is, the elemental
spheres, at the centre of the cosmos. Concomitantly, it disproved the
existence of a superlunary region composed entirely of incorruptible
aether circling the earth and hence disproved Aristotle’s
principal argument for supposing that the universe was finite.</div><br />
<b>Holger Andreas, Mario Günther: <a href="https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/108918/1/Pacific_Philosophical_Qtr_-_2024_-_Andreas_-_A_Regularity_Theory_of_Causation.pdf">A Regularity Theory of Causation</a></b> (pdf, 13632 words)<br /> <div>In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre-theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.</div><br />
<b>Matti Eklund: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/EKLCLP.pdf">Carnap, Language Pluralism, and Rationality</a></b> (pdf, 9096 words)<br /> <div>This paper will be centered on Carnap’s views on rationality. More specifically, much of the focus will be on a puzzle regarding Carnap’s view on rationality that Florian Steinberger (2016) has recently discussed. Not only is Steinberger’s discussion of significant intrinsic interest: his discussion also raises general questions about Carnap interpretation. As I have discussed in earlier work, there are two very different ways of interpreting Carnap’s talk of “frameworks” – and, relatedly, different ways of interpreting Carnap’s principle of tolerance. Carnap can be interpreted as either a <i>relativist</i> or as what I call a <i>language pluralist</i>. Steinberger’s puzzle arises given the relativist interpretation; I believe the language pluralist interpretation is correct. Most of the discussion will concern the correct interpretation of Carnap, and what this means for Steinberger’s puzzle. While I will not here mount a full defense of the language pluralist interpretation, I will pause to discuss Vera Flocke’s recent criticism of it. Towards the end, I will describe a puzzle regarding rationality different from Steinberger’s. The puzzle that I describe does arise already for the language pluralist.</div><br />
<b>Matti Eklund: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/EKLAAA.pdf">AI and Alien Languages</a></b> (pdf, 7854 words)<br /> <div>In this paper, I will focus on AI systems (“AIs”) as very different, or at least potentially very different, kinds of language users from what humans are. Much theorizing about language is, for natural and understandable reasons, focused on human language, primarily the natural languages we use. But when asking philosophical questions about language, we often want to consider what languages in general are, and not only consider human languages. There is some reason to think that AIs are different from us in relevant respects, so asking questions about languages used by AIs may be useful for these general questions about language.</div><br />
<b>Nicholas DiBella: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23191/1/Cantor,%20Choice,%20and%20Paradox.pdf">Cantor, Choice, and Paradox</a></b> (pdf, 17213 words)<br /> <div>I propose a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the Axiom of Choice is false. I argue that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the Axiom of Choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory.</div><br />
<b>Phillip Sloan: <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/origin-descent/">Darwin: From the </a></b> (html, 18126 words)<br /> <div>This entry offers a broad historical review of the origin and
development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection
through the initial Darwinian phase of the “Darwinian
Revolution” up to the publication of the <i>Descent of Man</i>
in 1871. The development of evolutionary ideas before Darwin’s
work has been treated in the separate entry
evolutionary thought before Darwin. Several additional aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution and
his biographical development are dealt with in other entries in this
encyclopedia (see the entries on
Darwinism;
species;
natural selection;
creationism).</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/do-you-and-i-see-colors-same-way.html">Do you and I see colors the same way?</a></b> (html, 493 words)<br /> <div>Suppose that Mary and Twin Mary live almost exactly duplicate lives in an almost black-and-white environment. The exception to the duplication of the lives and to the black-and-white character of the environment is that on their 18th birthday, each sees a colored square for a minute. …</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/more-fun-with-monochrome-mary.html">More fun with monochrome Mary</a></b> (html, 778 words)<br /> <div>Here’s a fun variant of the black-and-white Mary thought experiment. Mary has been brought up in a black-and-white environment, but knows all the microphysics of the universe from a big book. One day she sees a flash of green light. …</div><br />
<b>Azimuth: <a href="https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/the-probability-of-the-law-of-excluded-middle/">The Probability of the Law of Excluded Middle</a></b> (html, 211 words)<br /> <div>The Law of Excluded Middle says that for any statement P, “P or not P” is true. Is this law true? In classical logic it is. But in intuitionistic logic it’s not. So, in intuitionistic logic we can ask what’s the probability that a randomly chosen statement obeys the Law of Excluded Middle. …</div><br />
Articles and blog posts found on 12 March 20242024-03-12T23:59:00Z2024-03-12T23:59:00ZPhilosophical Progresstag:www.philosophicalprogress.org,2024-03-12://<b>A. Charles Muller: <a href="http://www.acmuller.net/articles/2024-03-sustainability.pdf">Sustainability and Well-Being through Mutual Causality: One Approach to Teaching SDGs Development</a></b> (pdf, 3367 words)<br /> <div>A few years back, Musashino University made the decision to broadly teach sustainability to all students starting from the freshman level. Since I had previously done no formal research on the topic, in order to prepare properly, I spent the two months before the semester reading extensively about the meaning and practice of sustainability. This study I conducted changed my mind about the topic, in the sense that I came to think that the SDGs was perhaps the most important course I have ever taught in the university. In teaching about the SDGs, we are providing our students with information vital to their future survival, not just at the level of employment, but at the level of providing for and protecting themselves and their families in the difficult world that is to come.</div><br />
<b>Andrea Oldofredi: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23187/1/Unexpected_Quantum_Indeterminacy_final.pdf">Unexpected Quantum Indeterminacy</a></b> (pdf, 2014 words)<br /> <div>Recent philosophical discussions about metaphysical indeterminacy have been substantiated with the idea that quantum mechanics, one of the most successful physical theories in the history of science, provides explicit instances of worldly indefiniteness. Against this background, several philosophers underline that there are alternative formulations of quantum theory in which such indeterminacy has no room and plays no role. A typical example is Bohmian mechanics in virtue of its clear particle ontology. Contrary to these latter claims, this paper aims at showing that different pilot-wave theories do in fact instantiate diverse forms of metaphysical indeterminacy. Namely, I argue that there are various questions about worldly states of affairs that cannot be determined by looking exclusively at their ontologies and dynamical laws. Moreover, it will be claimed that Bohmian mechanics generates a new form of modal indeterminacy. Finally, it will be concluded that ontological clarity and indeterminacy are not mutually exclusive, i.e., the two can coexist in the same theory.</div><br />
<b>Hasen (Tim) Khudairi (Bowen): <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23186/1/E.pdf">Epistemic Modality and Hyperintensionality in Mathematics</a></b> (pdf, 92962 words)<br /> <div>This book concerns the foundations of epistemic modality and hyperintensionality and their applications to the philosophy of mathematics. I examine the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The book demonstrates how epistemic modality and hyperintensionality relate to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality and hyperintensionality; the types of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality; to the epistemic status of large cardinal axioms, undecidable propositions, and abstraction principles in the philosophy of mathematics; to the modal and hyperintensional profiles of the logic of rational intuition; and to the types of intention, when the latter is interpreted as a hyperintensional mental state. Chapter <b>2</b> argues for a novel type of expressivism based on the duality between the categories of coalgebras and algebras, and argues that the duality permits of the reconciliation between modal cognitivism and modal expressivism. I also develop a novel topic-sensitive truthmaker semantics for dynamic epistemic logic, and develop a novel dynamic epistemic two-dimensional hyperintensional semantics. Chapter <b>3</b> provides an abstraction principle for epistemic (hyper-)intensions. Chapter <b>4</b> advances a topic-sensitive two-dimensional truthmaker semantics, and provides three novel interpretations of the framework along with the epistemic and metasemantic. Chapter <b>5</b> applies the fixed points of the modal <i>µ</i>-calculus in order to account for the iteration of epistemic states in a single agent, by contrast to availing of modal axiom 4 (i.e. the KK principle). The fixed point operators in the modal <i>µ</i>-calculus are rendered hyperintensional, which yields the first hyperintensional construal of the modal <i>µ</i>-calculus in the literature and the first application of the calculus to the iteration of epistemic states in a single agent instead of the common knowledge of a group of agents. Chapter <b>6</b> advances a solution to the Julius Caesar problem based on Fine’s ‘criterial’ identity conditions which incorporate conditions on essentiality and grounding. Chapter <b>7</b> provides a ground-theoretic regimentation of the proposals in the metaphysics of consciousness and examines its bearing on the two-dimensional conceivability argument against physicalism. The topic-sensitive epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker semantics developed in chapter <b>4</b> is availed of in order for epistemic states to be a guide to metaphysical states in the hyperintensional setting.</div><br />
<b>Katie H. Morrow: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23189/1/Niche%20Models_Preprint.pdf">Niches and Niche Models</a></b> (pdf, 8311 words)<br /> <div>The niche has been central to ecology for most of the discipline’s history, yet there have been few attempts by philosophers to work out the ontology of the niche. A challenge is that there is a plurality of seemingly inconsistent definitions of the niche in ecology. This paper characterizes the population-level ecological niche by distinguishing among niche concepts, niche models, and the niche as a phenomenon. I argue that “niche concepts” should be interpreted as theoretical frameworks or modelling strategies. I also argue that there is a unified niche phenomenon underlying the seemingly heterogeneous models and definitions. The plurality of niche concepts in ecology should be seen as an expected consequence of the nature of modelling complex systems.</div><br />
<b>Kevin Elliott: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23185/1/Brown%20Book%20VFI%20Chapter%20Preprint.pdf">Characterizing the Value-Free Ideal: From a Dichotomy to a Multiplicity</a></b> (pdf, 9916 words)<br /> <div>The value-free ideal (VFI) for science has been an important topic of debate for hundreds of years (Proctor 1991), and it has played a particularly significant role in the recent philosophical literature on “values and science.” Heather Douglas, whose critique of the VFI has been foundational for this recent philosophical literature, defines the VFI as the view that “the value judgments internal to science, involving the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results at the heart of the research process, are to be as free as humanly possible of all social and ethical values” (2009, 45). At this point, the dominant position among philosophers of science is that the VFI should be rejected (Brown under review; Douglas and Branch 2024; Parker 2024). By adopting this conclusion, scholars have opened up a range of important questions about how to manage the influences of values in science and how to distinguish appropriate roles for values from inappropriate roles (e.g., Holman and Wilholt 2022).</div><br />
<b>Nikolai Alksnis, Jack Reynolds: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23162/1/Revaluing_the_behaviorist_ghost_in_enact%20copy.pdf">Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition</a></b> (pdf, 12500 words)<br /> <div>Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed . The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference to qualia and/or mental events . Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not.</div><br />
<b>Radhakrishnan Srinivasan: <a href="https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23184/1/arb_const.pdf">Do arbitrary constants exist? A logical objection</a></b> (pdf, 1890 words)<br /> <div>In classical first-order logic (FOL), let T be a theory with an unspecified (arbitrary) constant c, where the symbol c does not occur in any of the axioms of T. Let psi(x) be a formula in the language of T that does not contain the symbol c. In a well-known result due to Shoenfield (the “theorem on constants”), it is proven that if psi(c) is provable in T, then so is psi(x), where x is the only free variable in psi(x). In the proof of this result, Shoenfield starts with the hypothesis that P is a valid proof of psi(c) in T, and then replaces each occurrence of c in P by a variable to obtain a valid proof of psi(x) in T, the argument being that no axiom of T is violated by this replacement. In this paper, we demonstrate that the theorem on constants leads to a meta-inconsistency in FOL (i.e., a logical inconsistency in the metatheory of T in which Shoenfield’s proof is executed), the root cause of which is the existence of arbitrary constants. In previous papers, the author has proposed a finitistic paraconsistent logic (NAFL) in which it is provable that arbitrary constants do not exist. The nonclassical reasons for this nonexistence are briefly examined and shown to be relevant to the above example.</div><br />
<b>Taylor Koles: <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/KOLTSO-8.pdf">The Semantics of Deadnames</a></b> (pdf, 13134 words)<br /> <div>Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic explanation for this derogation.</div><br />
<b>Tilman Hertz, T. homas Banitz, Rodrigo Martínez-Peña, Sonja Radosavljevic, Emilie Lindkvist, Lars-Göran Johansson, Petri Ylikoski, Maja Schlüter: <a href="https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1843646/FULLTEXT01">Eliciting the plurality of causal reasoning in social-ecological systems research</a></b> (pdf, 11409 words)<br /> <div>Understanding causation in social-ecological systems (SES) is indispensable for promoting sustainable outcomes. However, the study of such causal relations is challenging because they are often complex and intertwined, and their analysis involves diverse disciplines. Although there is agreement that no single research approach (RA) can comprehensively explain SES phenomena, there is a lack of ability to deal with this diversity. Underlying this diversity and the challenge of dealing with it are different causal reasonings that are rarely explicit. Awareness of hidden assumptions is essential for understanding how the causal reasoning of an RA is constituted, and for promoting the integration, translation, or juxtaposition of different RAs. We identify the following elements as particularly relevant for understanding causal reasoning: methods, frameworks and theories, accounts of causation, analytical focus, and causal notions. We begin with the idea that one of these elements typically figures as an entry point to an RA. This entry point is particularly important because it generates a path dependence that orients causal reasoning. In a subsequent step, when an approach is applied, causal reasoning concretizes as a result of a particular constellation of the remaining elements. We come to these insights by studying the application of four different RAs to the same social-ecological case (the collapse of Baltic cod stocks in the 1980s). On the basis of our findings we developed a guide for the analysis of causal reasoning by raising awareness of the assumptions, key elements, and the relations between these key elements for a given RA. The guide can be used to elicit the causal reasoning of RAs, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and support disclosure of ethical/political dimensions that underlie management/governance interventions that are formulated on the basis of causal findings of research studies.</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-epistemic-gap-and-causal-closure.html">The epistemic gap and causal closure</a></b> (html, 137 words)<br /> <div>In the philosophical literature, the main objection to physicalism about consciousness is the epistemic gap: the alleged fact that full knowledge of the physical does not yield full knowledge of the mental. …</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/trust-versus-prediction.html">Trust versus prediction</a></b> (html, 297 words)<br /> <div>What is the difference between trusting that someone will ϕ and merely predicting their ϕing? Here are two suggestions that don’t quite pan out. 1. In trusting, you have to have a pro-attitude towards ϕing. …</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/consent-desire-and-promises.html">Consent, desire and promises</a></b> (html, 468 words)<br /> <div>I have long argued that desire is not the same as consent: the fact that I want you to do something does not constitute consent to your doing it. Here is a neat little case that has occurred to me that seems to show this conclusively. …</div><br />
<b>Alexander Pruss's Blog: <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/03/promising-punishment.html">Promising punishment</a></b> (html, 546 words)<br /> <div>I have long found promises to punish puzzling. The problem with such promises is that normally a promisee can release the promisor from a promise. But what’s the point of me promising you a punishment should you do something if you can just release me from the promise when the time for the promise comes? …</div><br />
<b>Bet On It: <a href="https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-noble-truth-of-the-model-minority">The Noble Truth of the Model Minority</a></b> (html, 1502 words)<br /> <div>I recently stumbled upon Wikipedia’s article on the “Model minority myth.” Which instantly raises the question: “What precisely is mythical about this ‘myth’?”
The article’s bias is so astounding that I shall critique it line-by-line. …</div><br />
<b>Good Thoughts: <a href="https://rychappell.substack.com/p/the-utilitarian-tradition-is-conceptually">The Utilitarian Tradition is Conceptually Stunted</a></b> (html, 2562 words)<br /> <div>It’s no secret that I like (something close enough to) utilitarianism as a moral theory. But there’s one area where I think the utilitarian tradition really falls short, which is that it tends not to acknowledge the full range of normative concepts. …</div><br />