Philosophical Progress

Articles and blog posts found on 15 September 2025

2025-09-15T23:59:00Z

Caspar Jacobs: Against Presentist Velocities: Response to Gijsbers, 'Presentist Velocities' (pdf, 993 words)

Gijsbers (2025) has recently proposed an original theory of ‘presentist velocities’: the instantaneous relative positions and relative velocities of all bodies at the present instant are metaphysically fundamental, and their positions and velocities at both past and future times metaphysically depend on them. If physics is deterministic, then present such facts fully determine future such facts; if physics is indeterministic, then some past and future facts are indeterminate. For simplicity, I will focus on the deterministic case. e theory of presentist velocities (henceforth: TPV) solves some pernicious problems faced by other theories of velocity, such as the at-at theory (present velocities supervene on positions at different times). But Gijsbers’ presentation only considers classical mechanics, and does so in a relatively non-technical manner. If TPV is to succeed, it should also work for more realistic physical theories. e aim of this letter is to show that TPV falls short in this respect: once we look at the details of classical, statistical and relativistic mechanics, presentist velocities face serious obstacles.

Julian J. Schloeder: Do Kind Terms Denote Kinds? (pdf, 9201 words)

According to the causal theory of reference, the references of (some) natural kind terms are fixed in baptisms. To wit, a so-baptized kind term refers to those things that share a certain inner constitution with the sample used in the baptism. I argue that this is incompatible with the claim that natural kind terms are open textured, i.e. that semantics can underdetermine reference. The two views, fixed reference and open textured reference, entail competing claims about the course of science. By examining an episode from the history of science, the discovery of isotopes, I conclude in favor of open texture for natural kind terms.

Peter Zachar: Constituting Emotional Phenomena — A Mach-Influenced Empiricist Perspective (pdf, 6098 words)

Using the philosophical writings of Ernst Mach as a backdrop, I explore how concepts and classifications partly constitute the phenomena studied in the science of emotion by selecting features from a larger population of features. This process of selection is a matter of decision and is not inevitable, but it promotes populating concepts with empirical content. The openness of empirical concepts suggests that this selectionist constituting does not characterise only the early stages in the development of a science because background and foreground shifts are potentially ongoing. The theory of psychological construction, which contends that emotional episodes are constructed on the fly out of shifting sets of components, exemplifies this selectionist sense of constituting to the extent that it advocates for a resemblance nominalism, similar to that of Locke, in which selection is involved in naming kinds. Examples of constituting can be seen in changing definitions of whether animals experience emotion and in the choice of causal models.

Alexander Pruss's Blog: Divine willing (html, 717 words)

A correspondent asked me how a simple God can choose. I've thought much about this, never quite happy with what I have to say. I am still not happy (nor is it surprising if "how God functions" is beyond us!) …

Articles and blog posts found on 14 September 2025

2025-09-14T23:59:00Z

Mostly Aesthetics: Sugar-Coated Pills (html, 1122 words)

“Poetic expression,” says the sugar-coated-pill theory, “is the honey that makes palatable the medicine of content, be it philosophical, moral, or scientific.” It’s an old theory. It’s there even in Ancient Greek and Roman theory and practice: Lucretius dipped De rerum natura, his scientific/philosophical treatise about atoms swerving in the void, in the rhythms of dactylic hexameter. …

Richard Brown's blog: Animal Consciousness and the Unknown Power of the Unconscious Mind (html, 1072 words)

Things are about to get really (I mean really) busy for me and so I probably won’t be doing much besides running around frantically until August 2026 (seriously even by my standards it’s going to be a rough ride for a while). …

Articles and blog posts found on 13 September 2025

2025-09-13T23:59:00Z

Ahmed Al-Juhany: Why We Should Not Characterize Aging as a Disease (pdf, 12571 words)

Many scientists and philosophers characterize aging as a disease. In this article, I argue against doing so. Characterizing aging as a disease would likely exacerbate age-based discrimination, perpetuate beliefs that undermine our health, and embolden medical professionals to treat their patients unjustly. It would risk these harms without promising any benefits that would be substantial enough to make up for them. If we aim to avoid risking harms unnecessarily, we should not characterize aging as a disease.

Florian J. Boge: Rethinking Holism and Underdetermination (pdf, 15677 words)

Mature scientific hypotheses are confirmed by large amounts of independent evidence. How could anyone be an anti-realist under these conditions? A classic response appeals to confirmational holism and underdetermination, but it is unclear whether traditional arguments succeed. I offer a new line of argument: If holism is interpreted as saying that the confirmation of every part of a hypothesis depends on the confirmation of the whole hypothesis, we must formulate conditions under which the confirmation received by the whole can be transferred to its parts. However, underdetermination suggests that relevant conditions are typically not met. If this is true, the confirmation received by the whole remains bounded by the priors for the parts, and we lack compelling reasons to believe substantive hypotheses based on evidence beyond the degree to which the posits involved in them are antecedently believed. A rejoinder comes from selective realism: If some posit is preserved throughout theory change, it is confirmed beyond the degree to which the containing hypothesis is. However, the variant of holism considered here exactly implies that we cannot confirm such posits in isolation. As I will show, the realist is thus forced into a dilemma: Either she succumbs to the holistic challenge, or she must embrace meta-empirical facts, such as the posit’s recurrence, as confirmatory.

Galina Weinstein: Einstein’s Hidden Scaffolding, with a Glance at Poincaré (pdf, 13516 words)

This paper reconstructs the derivations underlying the kinematical part of Einstein’s 1905 special relativity paper, emphasizing their operational clarity and minimalist use of mathematics. Einstein employed modest tools—algebraic manipulations, Taylor expansions, partial differentials, and functional arguments—yet his method was guided by principles of linearity, symmetry, and invariance rather than the elaborate frameworks of electron theory. The published text in Annalen der Physik concealed much of the algebraic scaffolding, presenting instead a streamlined sequence of essential equations. Far from reflecting a lack of sophistication, this economy of means was a deliberate rhetorical and philosophical choice: to demonstrate that relativity arises from two simple postulates and basic operational definitions, not from the complexities of electron theory. The reconstruction highlights how Einstein’s strategy subordinated mathematics to principle, advancing a new mode of reasoning in which physical insight, rather than computational elaboration, held decisive authority. In this respect, I show that Einstein’s presentation diverges sharply from Poincare’s. This paper is in memory of John Stachel, whose life’s work was devoted to illuminating Einstein’s special and general relativity.

Galina Weinstein: Convergences and Divergences: Einstein, Poincaré, and Special Relativity (pdf, 11972 words)

Jean-Marc Ginoux’s recent book, Poincare, Einstein and the Discovery of Special Relativity: An End to the Controversy (2024), seeks to close the debate over the respective roles of Poincare and Einstein. Yet what is presented as an “end” may instead invite a more careful analysis of how similar equations can conceal divergent conceptions. The aim here is not to rehearse priority disputes but to show how Einstein’s ether-free, principle-based kinematics marked out a path that, unlike its contemporaries, became the canonical form of special relativity. To this end, I reconstruct side by side the 1905 derivations of Poincare and Einstein, tracing their similarities and, more importantly, their differences. This paper reconstructs, in a novel way, the 1905 derivations of Einstein and Poincare, highlighting their contrasting paths.

Under the Net: Reader's Digest: September 13, 2025 (html, 798 words)

A recent exchange in the New Left Review asks an unusual question: Why is there the amount of art that there is? More specifically, provoked by the $6.2 million sale of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—a banana duct-taped to a wall—Malcolm Bull wants to know why there aren’t more “readymades,” a seeming font of money from nothing. …

Articles and blog posts found on 12 September 2025

2025-09-12T23:59:00Z

Eric Scarffe, Katherine Valde: Toward a Jurisprudential Philosophy of Science: Beyond the Value Free Ideal (pdf, 11608 words)

This paper draws an analogy between the value-free ideal (VFI) found in the domains of science and law, and argues that appreciating the similarities between these misplaced ideals mutually reinforces the arguments against the VFI in each domain, and can open up new conceptual space within debates about the proper role(s) of values within the practices of science and law alike. Although a jurisprudential philosophy of science is not mutually exclusive with the development of a political philosophy of science, we believe philosophers of science would do well to consider drawing on law and jurisprudence, as opposed to moral and political philosophy, in thinking about ways forward within these debates.

Umair Halim: Quantum Probabilities as Emergent from Interacting Wavefunctions (pdf, 3637 words)

We present a conceptual framework in which quantum probabilities arise from discrete events generated by real-valued alignments of inner products between two dynamically evolving wavefunctions. In this perspective, discreteness and probabilistic behavior emerge from the temporal structure of such events rather than being imposed axiomatically. Illustrative calculations show that the Born rule can appear as the limiting frequency of these events, without invoking wavefunction collapse, many-worlds branching, or decision-theoretic postulates. A two-state example demonstrates consistency with standard quantum predictions and suggests how outcome frequencies track Born weights. Extensions to interference scenarios, quantization heuristics, and multidimensional systems indicate that this proposal provides a fresh conceptual angle on the origin of quantum probabilities. This work is exploratory and aims to highlight the underlying idea rather than provide a completed alternative theory; questions concerning dynamical equations, general proofs, and experimental signatures remain open for future research.

Zalán Gyenis, Tomasz Placek: No choice, no history (pdf, 10815 words)

This paper investigates histories in Branching Space-Time (BST) structures. We start by identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of free histories, and then we turn to the intangibility problem, and we show that the existence of histories in BST structures is equivalent to the axiom of choice, yielding the punchline “history gives us choice”.

Scott Aaronson's blog: Quantum Information Supremacy (html, 540 words)

I’m thrilled that our paper entitled Demonstrating an unconditional separation between quantum and classical information resources, based on a collaboration between UT Austin and Quantinuum, is finally up on the arXiv. …

Articles and blog posts found on 11 September 2025

2025-09-11T23:59:00Z

Charles H. Pence: Textual Analysis and Conceptual Cartography (pdf, 7869 words)

At first blush, it might seem as though digital approaches could provide us with precisely the kind of input we need to perform something like conceptual analysis in the philosophy of science: querying the expressed intuitions of the “folk” (here, practicing scientists publishing in the journal literature) to see how they put various concepts to use, to which cases they believe they can be applied, etc. In this chapter, I want to nuance this argument, both by clarifying what we might mean by “conceptual analysis” in this case and by tempering expectations about what digital approaches could be reasonably expected to give us. I claim that such a more moderate goal, which I’ll call here “conceptual cartography,” can still provide the philosophy of science with a number of advantages (which are otherwise difficult to attain), while avoiding the possibility of making promises that we can’t fulfill. Keywords: digital humanities, digital philosophy, textual analysis, topic modeling, conceptual analysis, conceptual cartography Digital philosophy (or, even more broadly, the digital humanities in general) is an impossibly broad subject. It could mean the creation of new digital philosophical content—for instance, preparing digital editions of manuscripts, or digital exhibitions on the life, correspondence, and works of philosophers. It might be about the use of computer modeling to represent processes of philosophical interest, like the development or spread of scientific knowledge (see Aydin Mohseni’s chapter in this volume). It could involve mapping the connections between documents or authors by way of citation analysis, revealing the network structure that binds them together (see Catherine Herfeld’s chapter in this volume).

Dubian Cañas: Metahistorical reasoning and philosophical disagreement: Revisiting the selective realism debate about the caloric episode (pdf, 22602 words)

By exploring a prominent controversy in the recent history of the philosophy of science, I vindicate the role of metahistorical reasoning when historical case studies are used as evidence to support conflicting philosophical claims. I draw upon the selective realism debate concerning the caloric theory of heat as a case study, arguing that basic criteria of historical adequacy are sufficiently robust to adjudicate this disagreement. On these grounds, I rebut the view that the dispute about caloric cannot be resolved in historical terms. This position is based upon historical pluralism —i.e., the argument that historical evidence cannot settle philosophical disagreements, partially because historiographical standards are too weak for adjudication. After characterizing historical pluralism and considering its rationale in diagnosing the selective realism debate about caloric, I show how this philosophical conflict is resolved in terms of standards for assessing the quality of the competing reconstructions of Joseph Black’s and Antoine Lavoisier’s epistemic pronouncements about the materiality of heat.

Dubian Cañas: Three epistemological desiderata for HPS practitioners (pdf, 12769 words)

In this paper, I outline an epistemology of evidential reasoning in the history and philosophy of science (HPS). Drawing upon some prominent works in HPS as case studies, I formulate three novel epistemological desiderata for using historical case studies as evidence for philosophical claims about science, to wit: independent historical evidence, metahistorical criticism, and disciplinary alignment. These desiderata pick out some epistemic qualities and contribute to the achievement of the primary goal of evidential reasoning, which is to confer justification upon philosophical conclusions on the basis of historical evidence. In this way, my proposed epistemology tackles the “methodological” problem of vicious circularity and the “metaphysical” problem of disciplinary unsuitability that allegedly jeopardise HPS practice, thereby vindicating its positive epistemic status.

Jon Perez Laraudogoitia: Rescher'S Aporetics And A Road To The Voigt Transformation (doc, 5831 words)

With the classical distinction between context of discovery and context of justification considered by many to have been overcome, heuristics (understood in a broad sense) has increasingly rekindled the interest of philosophers of science. Building on this trend, a heuristic approach to the Voigt transformation (based on Rescher's Aporetics) is first presented - an issue on which there seem to be no precedents in the literature. Second, the value of this approach is defended from a philosophical (and, indirectly, pedagogical) viewpoint. By using this approach, several conceptual links in the theory of space-time can be highlighted (links which go unnoticed in classical hypothetical-deductive methods leading to the Voigt transformation). In particular an interesting connection with the Lorentz transformation becomes apparent.

Jonah Branding: Can a marker approach exclude? (doc, 9077 words)

If an organism displays enough of the right neural, cognitive, or behavioral “markers,” researchers can generally assume it’s phenomenally conscious. But what if it doesn’t? Recently, there has been substantial disagreement on this “exclusion question.” According to one view (what I call the “symmetry” view), organisms lacking markers probably aren’t conscious (Dennett 1995; Tye 2016a; Birch 2022; Veidt 2022). However, according to another (the “asymmetry” view), we cannot conclude anything about the presence or absence of consciousness in organisms lacking markers (Prinz 2005; Schwitzgebel 2020; Andrews 2020, 2022, 2024). Here I argue that this disagreement partially reflects a deeper disagreement about how markers are identified; to this end, I point to three “paths” from specific ideas about marker identification (namely, theory-based, analogy-based, and function-based approaches) to one or the other view on exclusion. Equipped with the right auxiliary assumptions, theory- and analogy-based approaches can motivate the asymmetry view, whereas function-based approaches can motivate the symmetry view. However, this relation is not deterministic, as different auxiliary assumptions will lead to different views about exclusion. My distilled product is therefore a decision tree, which links views about marker identification to one or the other view on exclusion. I hope that this tree will serve as a means of identifying “fronts” where future debate on this question can be productively focused.

José Augusto de Lima Prestes: Reconfiguration, Not Reinvention: Pseudo-Consciousness and Simulated Presence Literacy in AI Ethics (pdf, 14175 words)

This article claims that the salient ethical risk of generative AI is not machine consciousness but the social efficacy of its simulation—what we call pseudo-consciousness. Read through Heidegger’s Gestell, Jonas’s anticipatory responsibility, and Floridi’s information ethics, we relocate appraisal from putative inner states to interactional effects in the infosphere. We formalize a two-part mechanism/uptake frame: functional introspection (_fi)—first-person, reason-giving, self-repair, and local cross-turn stability—and ethical illusion (_ei)—shifts in trust, respect, compliance, and moral ratings that attenuate on disclosure. Building on this, we propose simulated presence literacy (_spl) as a domain-specific facet of AI literacy that teaches users to perceive _fi, appraise _ei, and respond with counter-uptake practices. We then advance an ethics of appearance in design: four levers (semio-transparency, attenuation of reciprocity illusion, calibrated trust, and constraints on first-person density), two KPIs (_fi Score, _ei Index), a minimal 2×2 to test mechanism → uptake and disclosure attenuation, and a five-step audit loop for governance. The result is a humanistic response—reconfiguration, not reinvention—that keeps fluency from passing for presence by making simulation legible, bounded, and accountable, with heightened precautions for vulnerable populations. In humanities research, teaching, and curation, treating LLMs as semantic artifacts, rather than as subjects, preserves interpretive agency while retaining the benefits of fluent assistance.

Stuart Glennan: On Mechanisms, Pathways, and their Models (pdf, 10213 words)

Lauren Ross has recently argued that the current philosophical enthusiasm for mechanisms poses a threat to a proper understanding of the diversity of causal structures found in biology, and of the diversity of ways in which biologists explain biological phenomena. Ross argues that new mechanists have collapsed a variety of distinct causal structures within the confining analytical strictures of mechanism, and in so doing have failed to appreciate the diversity of concepts and strategies needed to describe and explain biological phenomena. Ross grants that mechanisms are important in biology, but argues that there are other causal structures, like pathways and cascades, that are distinct from mechanisms, and that require distinctive treatments. In this paper I’ll argue that Ross’s worries arise from a failure to distinguish ontological questions about causal structure from methodological questions about modeling and explanation. I’ll argue that a mechanistic ontology is compatible with conceptual and explanatory pluralism, and along the way I will offer a new analysis of pathways and pathway models that draws on some of Ross’s insights.

William Kretschmer, Sabee Grewal, Matthew DeCross, Justin A. Gerber, Kevin Gilmore, Dan Gresh, Nicholas Hunter-Jones, Karl Mayer, Brian Neyenhuis, David Hayes, Scott Aaronson: Demonstrating an unconditional separation between quantum and classical information resources (pdf, 23543 words)

A longstanding goal in quantum information science is to demonstrate quantum computations that cannot be feasibly reproduced on a classical computer. Such demonstrations mark major milestones: they showcase fine control over quantum systems and are prerequisites for useful quantum computation. To date, quantum advantage has been demonstrated, for example, through violations of Bell inequalities and sampling-based quantum supremacy experiments. However, both forms of advantage come with important caveats: Bell tests are not computationally difficult tasks, and the classical hardness of sampling experiments relies on unproven complexity-theoretic assumptions.

Alexander Pruss's Blog: Why do we like being confident? (html, 255 words)

We like being more confident. We enjoy having credences closer to 0 or 1. Even if the proposition we are confident in is one that is such that it is a bad thing that it is true, the confidence itself, abstracted from the badness of the state of affairs reported by the proposition, is something we enjoy. …

The Archimedean Point: On the Progressive Consumption Tax, Again (html, 1455 words)

Very short summary: In this essay, I discuss an objection to my claim that Hayek’s argument against progressive taxation doesn’t apply to the progressive consumption tax. I concede that under a steady state where growth has stalled, the claim falls. …

Azimuth: Categories for Public Health Modeling (html, 1298 words)

How, exactly, can category theory help modeling in public health? I wrote a paper about this with two people who helped run Canada’s COVID modeling, together with a software engineer and a mathematician at the Topos Institute: • John Baez, Xiaoyan Li, Sophie Libkind, Nathaniel D. Osgood and Eric Redekopp, A categorical framework for modeling with stock and flow diagrams, in Mathematics of Public Health: Mathematical Modelling from the Next Generation, eds. …

Articles and blog posts found on 10 September 2025

2025-09-10T23:59:00Z

Ben Caplan: Existence (pdf, 3873 words)

According to a prominent view about existence, it’s a property of things; there’s only one kind of existence; it’s the same as being; everything has it; it’s tied to first-order existential quantification; and ‘exist’ isn’t ambiguous or context-sensitive. But each of these metaphysical or semantic claims is disputed. Some argue that existence is a higher-order property of properties, or that there’s more than one kind of existence, or that existence and being are diPerent, or that some things don’t exist, or that quantification doesn’t have anything to do with existence, or that ‘exist’ is ambiguous or context-sensitive.

Dilip Ninan: Modality and the Future (pdf, 10580 words)

Are English future auxiliaries (like will and be going to) modals in some semantically interesting sense? Are they the semantic brethren of might and should, or are they more similar to the past and past tenses? According to the non-modal view of future auxiliaries, such expressions merely serve to shift the time of evaluation forward, just as the past tense shifts the time of evaluation backward. Perhaps the most familiar modal analysis of future operators is the Peircean theory discussed by Prior (1967). One version of this theory says that _fut ϕ is true just in case ϕ is true at all future possibilities (more carefully: _fut ϕ is true at a world w and time t just in case every future possibility w for w at t is such that there is a time t later than t such that ϕ is true at w and t ). But what is a future possibility? A schematic answer: given a possible world w and a time t, we say that w is a future possibility for w at t iff w is sufficiently similar to w up until and including t (so w and w may differ significantly thereafter).

Stephen M. Fleming, Matthias Michel: Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision (pdf, 20305 words)

This Target Article has been accepted for publication and has not yet been copyedited and proofread. The article may be cited using its doi (About doi), but it must be made clear that it is not the final version.

Thomas Bolander, Alessandro Burigana, Marco Montali: Depth-Bounded Epistemic Planning (pdf, 10843 words)

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for epistemic planning based on dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). The novelty is that we limit the depth of reasoning of the planning agent to an upper bound b, meaning that the planning agent can only reason about higher-order knowledge to at most (modal) depth b. The algorithm makes use of a novel type of canonical b-bisimulation contraction guaranteeing unique minimal models with respect to b-bisimulation. We show our depth-bounded planning algorithm to be sound. Additionally, we show it to be complete with respect to planning tasks having a solution within bound b of reasoning depth (and hence the iterative bound-deepening variant is complete in the standard sense). For bound b of reasoning depth, the algorithm is shown to be (b + 1)-E XPTIME complete, and furthermore fixed-parameter tractable in the number of agents and atoms. We present both a tree search and a graph search variant of the algorithm, and we benchmark an implementation of the tree search version against a baseline epistemic planner.

Bet On It: Non-Competes Re-Reconsidered (html, 965 words)

An anonymous reader sent me this critique of my “Dynamic Case for Non-Compete,” featured in Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-Faire. Enjoy! You argue that non-competes can be beneficial since they make companies willing to share sensitive IP to employees. …

Richard Brown's blog: Philosophy of Animal Consciousness (html, 1051 words)

The fall 2025 semester is off and running. I have a lot going on this semester, with Consciousness Live! kicking off in September, and teaching my usual 5 classes at LaGuardia. Since the Graduate Center Philosophy Program recently hired Kristen Andrews I have been sitting in on her philosophy of animal consciousness and society class she is offering. …

Articles and blog posts found on 09 September 2025

2025-09-09T23:59:00Z

Daniel W. Harris: Grice and Speech-Act Theory (pdf, 7721 words)

In the course of developing his theory of meaning, Grice also developed an influential theory of speech acts. The main idea is that to perform a speech act is to act with a communicative intention, and speech acts of different kinds are intended to produce different kinds of responses in addressees. This theory wasn’t intended to apply to conventional acts, like pronouncing a couple married or testifying in court, but only to communicative acts, like asserting, requesting, and directing. And, notably, Grice’s theory applies to indirect, nonlinguistic, and non-conventional communicative acts, in addition to those performed with linguistic utterances. In this chapter, I spell out this theory in greater detail, trace its origins in Grice’s work and later developments by others, and show how it relates to several other schools of thought about speech acts.

Alexander Pruss's Blog: Observations and risk of confirmation/disconfirmation (html, 236 words)

It seems that a rational agent cannot guarantee their credence in a hypothesis H to go up by choosing what observation to perform. For if no matter what I observe, my credence in H goes up given my observation, then my credence should already have gone up prior to the observation—I should boost my credence from the armchair. …