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441775.21147
Introduction: Intepreting Physical Theory in Modern Science 0.1 The Syntactic and Semantic Views of Scientific Theories . . . . . 0.2 Scientific Theories and Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.3
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441781.21159
Theorists have found it difficult to reconcile the unity of inner speech as a mental state kind with the diversity of its manifestations. I argue that existing views concerning the content of inner speech fail to accommodate both of these features because they mistakenly assume that its content is to be found in the ‘speech processing hierarchy’, which includes semantic, syntactic, phonemic, phonetic, and articulatory levels. Upon rejecting this assumption, I offer a position on which the content of inner speech is determined by voice processing, of which speech processing is but one component. The resulting view does justice to the idea that inner speech is a motley assortment of episodes that nevertheless form a kind.
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441802.211635
There is, on a given moral view, a constraint against performing acts of a certain type if and only if that view prohibits agents from performing an instance of that act-type even to prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. The fact that commonsense morality includes many such constraints has been seen by several philosophers as a decisive objection against consequentialism. Despite this, I argue that constraints are actually best accommodated with a consequentialist framework. For I argue that when we combine agent-relative consequentialism with a Kantian theory of value, we arrive at a version of consequentialism, which I call Kantsequentialism, that has several advantages over the standard side-constraint approach to accommodating constraints. What’s more, I argue that this theory doesn’t have any of the disadvantages that critics of consequentializing have presumed that it must have.
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441847.211671
Epistemic planning based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) allows agents to reason and plan from the perspective of other agents. The framework of DEL-based epistemic planning thereby has the potential to represent significant aspects of Theory of Mind in autonomous robots, and to provide a foundation for human-robot collaboration in which coordination is achieved implicitly through perspective shifts. In this paper, we build on previous work in epistemic planning with implicit coordination. We introduce a new notion of indistinguishability between epistemic states based on bisimulation, and provide a novel partition refinement algorithm for computing unique representatives of sets of indistinguishable states. We provide an algorithm for computing implicitly coordinated plans using these new constructs, embed it in a perceive-plan-act agent loop, and implement it on a robot. The planning algorithm is benchmarked against an existing epistemic planning algorithm, and the robotic implementation is demonstrated on human-robot collaboration scenarios requiring implicit coordination.
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441902.211702
Consider a toy system consisting of a marble and box. The marble has two states, |"in and |"out, corresponding to the marble being inside or outside the box. These states are eigenvectors of the operator ˆB, measuring whether the marble is inside or outside the box. The formalism of quantum mechanics (QM) has it that not only |"in and |"out themselves, but any superposition |"m = a |"in + b |"out where a and b are complex numbers such that |a| + |b| = 1, can be the state of the marble. What are the properties of the marble in such a state? This question is commonly answered by appeal to the so-called Eigenstate-Eigenvalue Rule (EER): An observable ˆO has a well-defined value for a quantum a system S in state |" if, and only if, |" is an eigenstate of ˆ . Since |"in and |"out are eigen-states of ˆB, EER yields that the marble is either inside (or outside) the box if its state is |"in (or |"out). However, states like |"m defy interpretation on the basis of EER and we have to conclude that if the marble is in such a state then it is neither inside nor outside the box. This is unacceptable because we know from experience that marbles are always either inside or outside boxes. Reconciling this fact of everyday experience with the quantum formalism is the infamous measurement problem. See also Bohmian mechanics; Measurement theory; Metaphysics in Quantum Mechanics; Modal Interpretation; Objectification; Projection Postulate.
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441937.211731
For many purposes we need to move beyond passive observation, focusing instead on what would happen were we to act upon a given system. Even further, we sometimes desire to explain the behavior of a system, raising questions about what would have occurred had some aspects of a situation been different. Such questions depend not just on the data distribution; they depend on deeper features of underlying data-generating processes or mechanisms. It is thus generally acknowledged that stronger assumptions are required if we want to draw causal conclusions from data [39, 30, 21, 32, 35].
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441968.211761
More than twenty years ago, I published a paper (von Fintel 1999) that among other things presented an analysis of the semantics of desire ascriptions. In a footnote, I wrote: with a good glass of red wine and paper and pencil it is astonishingly easy to come up with candidate analyses that are not blatantly implausible. Wouldn’t it be nice if the language learner got some obvious clues about which meanings are serious contenders …?
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442014.211809
The literature on corporate moral responsibility (CMR) is largely focused on the question of whether corporations are the kinds of things that can be morally responsible. The assumption is that if we judge corporations to be responsible, then we ought to hold them responsible by punishing them both socially and criminally. However, opponents have long emphasized the high costs and few benefits of this punishment. Because of the apparent harm to stakeholders, some have even argued that we are not justified in holding corporations responsible even if they technically are. Here, I respond to these concerns. By contextualizing the harm to stakeholders that does occur and emphasizing what is lost in our failing to adequately punish corporations, I show why a proponent of CMR should presumptively take us to be justified in holding corporations responsible.
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442053.211857
This dissertation is an investigation into the relation between mind and language from different perspectives, split up into three interrelated but still, for the most part, self-standing parts. Parts I and II are concerned with the question how thought is affected by language while Part III investigates the scope covered by mind and language respectively. Part I provides a reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous Private Language Argument in order to apply the rationale behind this line of argument to the relation between mind and language. This argumentative strategy yields the conclusion that reasoning – an important type of thought – is constitutively dependent on language possession and is therefore not available to non-linguistic creatures. This result is achieved by considering the preconditions for reasoning – given that it is a rule-governed activity – and eliminating competitors to language for providing reasoners with what it takes to reason.
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442057.211887
I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show that two leading hinge approaches (Coliva’s acceptance account and Pritchard’s nondoxastic account) are vulnerable to a form of incommensurability that leads to relativism. Building on both accounts, I introduce a new, minimally epistemic conception of hinges that avoids epistemic relativism and rationally resolves hinge disagreements. According to my proposed account, putative cases of epistemic incommensurability are rationally resolvable: hinges are propositions that are the objects of our belief-like attitudes and are rationally revisable in virtue of our overarching commitment to avoid systematic deception in our epistemic practices.
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442093.211912
We introduce a summary wellbeing measure for economic evaluation of cross‐ sectoral public policies with impacts on health and living standards. We show how to calculate period‐specific and lifetime wellbeing using quality‐adjusted life years based on widely available data on health‐related quality of life and consumption and normative assumptions about three parameters—minimal consumption, standard consumption, and the elasticity of the marginal value of consumption. We also illustrate how these three parameters can be tailored to the decision‐making context and varied in sensitivity analysis to provide information about the implications of alternative value judgments. As well as providing a general measure for cost‐effectiveness analysis and cost‐benefit analysis in terms of wellbeing, this approach also facilitates distributional analysis in terms of how many good years different population subgroups can expect to live under different policy scenarios.
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442101.21194
We do not know which extreme risk will come next, but we do know what many of the most extreme risks are, and that our preparation needs to be much better. This paper proposes a new Three Lines of Defence system to ensure that extreme risks are sufficiently captured in UK risk management. It suggests going beyond simply ‘fighting the last war’ and focusing solely on better pandemic preparedness, instead of transforming the UK’s resilience to extreme risks across the board.
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442119.21197
James Joyce’s article “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism” introduced an approach to arguing for credal norms by appealing to the epistemic value of accuracy. The central thought was that credences ought to accurately represent the world, a guiding thought that has gone on to generate an entire research paradigm on the rationality of credences. Recently, a number of epistemologists have begun to apply this same thought to full beliefs, attempting to explain and argue for norms of belief in terms of epistemic value. This paper examines these recent attempts, showing how they interact with work on the accuracy of credences. It then examines how differing judgments about epistemic value give rise to distinct rational requirements for belief, concluding by considering some of the fundamental questions and issues yet to be fully explored.
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493216.212006
David Wiggins’ extraordinary book is a kind of opinionated introduction—or, as he suggests (vii), a reintroduction—to the philosophy of morality. It aims to put its reader in a position to begin addressing three interconnected questions: (A) …the question of the substance or content of morality, its nature, and its extent. (B) …the question of the reasons there may be—and the reasons agents may make their own—to participate, persevere, and persist in morality.
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499628.212049
This paper draws attention to similarities between Hume and Kahneman: Hume’s contrast between custom and reason anticipates Kahneman’s contrast between System 1 and System 2. Each appeals to similar psychological and epistemic features to make the contrast.
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515796.212084
We introduce a novel approach to the problem of decision-making under moral uncertainty, based on an analogy to a parliament. The appropriate choice under moral uncertainty is the one that would be reached by a parliament comprised of delegates representing the interests of each moral theory, who number in proportion to your credence in that theory. We present what we see as the best specific approach of this kind (based on proportional chances voting), and also show how the parliamentary approach can be used as a general framework for thinking about moral uncertainty, where extant approaches to addressing moral uncertainty correspond to parliaments with different rules and procedures.
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524035.212112
This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasipsychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research.
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524108.21214
Although metaphysics has made an impressive comeback over the past half century, there are still a great many philosophers today who think it is bullshit, under numerous precisifications of ‘That’s just bullshit’ so that it’s a negative assessment and doesn’t apply to most philosophy (so it singles out metaphysics as particularly worse off than most other fields of philosophy). One encounters this attitude countless times in casual conversations, social media, and occasionally in print (e.g. Ladyman and Ross, 2007). Is it true?
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524483.212166
The discernible context in which linguistic communication takes place typically underdetermines which proposition is literally expressed by a context-sensitive (declarative) sentence (in context) used to do the communication. A growing number of theorists believe this underdetermination to have exciting and unexpected implications for our understanding of linguistic communication. For instance, and roughly speaking, some think it shows that you cannot mean that a man is dying down at the local bar by saying “A man is dying down at the local bar”, while others think that in many circumstances where you wouldn’t expect it, if someone tells you that a man is dying down at the local bar by saying “A man is dying down at the local bar” then you cannot know that a man is dying down at the local bar because you don’t know that this is what that someone said. But it is not self-evident that underdetermination has any such special implications for the nature of linguistic communication: if it were self-evident, there would be no need to publish arguments defending the implications.
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524600.212192
It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College.
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533911.212218
We provide a philosophical reconstruction and analysis of the debate on the scientific status of cosmic inflation that has played out in recent years. In a series of critical papers, Ijjas et al. have questioned the scientificality of the current views on cosmic inflation. Proponents of cosmic inflation have in turn defended the scientific credentials of their approach. We argue that, while this defense, narrowly construed, is successful against Ijjas et al., the latters’ reasoning does point to a significant epistemic issue that arises with respect to inflation. A broadening of the concept of theory assessment is needed to address that issue in an adequate way.
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533956.212244
The increasing success of the evidence-based policy movement is raising the demand of empirically informed decision making. As arguably any policy decision happens under conditions of uncertainty, following our best available evidence to reduce the uncertainty seems a requirement of good decision making. However, not all the uncertainty faced by decision makers can be resolved by evidence. In this paper, we build on a philosophical analysis of uncertainty to identify the boundaries of scientific advice in policy decision making. We start by introducing a distinction between empirical and non-empirical types of uncertainty, and we explore the role of two non-empirical uncertainties in the context of policy making. We argue that the authority of scientific advisors is limited to empirical uncertainty and cannot extend beyond it. While the appeal of evidence-based policy rests on a view of scientific advice as limited to empirical uncertainty, in practice there is a risk of over-reliance on experts beyond the legitimate scope of their authority. We conclude by applying our framework to a real-world case of evidence-based policy, where experts have overstepped their boundaries by ignoring non-empirical types of uncertainty.
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534068.212275
Noether’s theorems are widely praised as some of the most beautiful and useful results in physics. However, if one reads the majority of standard texts and literature on the application of Noether’s first theorem to field theory, one immediately finds that the “canonical Noether energy-momentum tensor” derived from the 4-parameter translation of the Poincar´e group does not correspond to what’s widely accepted as the “physical” energy-momentum tensor for central theories such as electrodynamics. This gives the impression that Noether’s first theorem is in some sense not working. In recognition of this issue, common practice is to “improve” the canonical Noether energy-momentum tensor by adding suitable ad-hoc “improvement” terms that will convert the canonical expression into the desired result. On the other hand, a less common but distinct method developed by Bessel-Hagen considers gauge symmetries as well as coordinate symmetries when applying Noether’s first theorem; this allows one to uniquely derive the accepted physical energy-momentum tensor without the need for any ad-hoc improvement terms in theories with exactly gauge invariant actions. Given these two distinct methods to obtain an energy-momentum tensor, the question arises as to whether one of these methods corresponds to a preferable application of Noether’s first theorem. Using the converse of Noether’s first theorem, we show that the Bessel- Hagen type transformations are uniquely selected in the case of electrodynamics, which powerfully dissolves the methodological ambiguity at hand. We then go on to consider how this line of argument applies to a variety of other cases, including in particular the challenge of defining an energy-momentum tensor for the gravitational field in linearised gravity. Finally, we put the search for proper Noether energy-momentum tensors into context with recent claims that Noether’s theorem and its converse make statements on equivalence classes of symmetries and conservation laws: We aim to identify clearly the limitations of this latter move, and develop our position by contrast with recent philosophical discussions about how symmetries relate to the representational capacities of our theories.
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534113.212303
The history of QBism is interestingly complex (see Stacey 2019) leading to misunderstandings and misapprehensions as to its core features (Earman 2019; Fuchs and Stacey 2020). Fuchs has usefully situated those features within the framework constituted by forms of ‘participatory realism’ (Fuchs 2016). Within that context I shall consider the claim that measurement devices should be considered to be extensions of agents. Examining that claim, Peinaar (2020) has articulated the conditions that measurement devices must meet to be so considered. However, there has yet been little similar consideration of the conditions that agents must meet in this regard. Here I shall examine claims that adopting a phenomenological stance may fill the gap in the QBists’ picture and I shall conclude by exploring certain concerns that arise as a result.
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534167.212334
Mismatch is a prominent concept in evolutionary medicine and a number of philosophers have published analyses of this concept. The word ‘mismatch’ has been used in a diversity of ways across a range of sciences, leading these authors to regard it as a vague concept in need of philosophical clarification. Here, in contrast, we concentrate on the use of mismatch in modelling and experimentation in evolutionary medicine. This reveals a rigorous theory of mismatch within which the term ‘mismatch’ is indeed used in several ways, not because it is ill-defined but because different forms of mismatch are distinguished within the theory. Contemporary evolutionary medicine has unified the idea of ‘evolutionary mismatch’, derived from the older idea of ‘adaptive lag’ in evolution, with ideas about mismatch in development and physiology derived from the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) paradigm. A number of publications in evolutionary medicine have tried to make this theoretical framework explicit. We build on these to present the theory in as simple and general a form as possible. We introduce terminology, largely drawn from the existing literature, to distinguish the different forms of mismatch. This integrative theory of mismatch captures how organisms track environments across space and time on multiple scales in order to maintain an adaptive match to the environment, and how failures of adaptive tracking lead to disease. Mismatch is a productive organising concept within this theory which helps researchers articulate how physiology, development and evolution interact with one another and with environmental change to explain health outcomes.
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534302.212366
Much of the recent explosion of literature on scientific progress was ignited by Bird’s provocative article “What Is Scientific Progress?” (Bird, 2007), where he advocates an “epistemic” account of scientific progress, a kind of view which he alleges is lately overlooked, despite its venerable history. In making room for his account, Bird criticizes what he takes to have been the most prominent accounts of scientific progress advanced in the latter half of the 20th century. He claims that realist philosophers of science have often taken truth to be the ultimate goal of science and its progress to be properly characterized by an accumulation of truths, or at least an approximating approach to them. By contrast, historically-minded philosophers of science and anti-realists have frequently rejected the realists’ notion of truth as a goal of science, instead preferring to characterize progress in terms of, among other things, success in problem-solving, as in the well-known views of Kuhn (1996) and Laudan (1977). In his paper, Bird criticizes the realists for overlooking the importance of justification to progress and the anti-realists for giving up on truth—both regarded as being essential elements of the generally received conception of knowledge in analytic epistemology. According to Bird, it is knowledge that should properly be regarded as the principal aim of science: science makes progress precisely when it realizes the accumulation of scientific knowledge.
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547628.212393
I explore the motivation and logical consequences of the idea that we have some (limited) ability to know contingent facts about the future, even in presence of the assumption that the future is objectively unsettled or indeterminate. I start by formally characterizing skepticism about the future. This analysis nudges the anti-skeptic towards the idea that if some propositions about the future are objectively indeterminate, then it may be indeterminate whether a suitably positioned agent knows them.
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556516.21242
Over the past few years, I have occasionally defended a position called 'ethical behaviourism'. Ethical behaviourism holds that when it comes to determining the moral status of our relationship with another being, behaviour is a sufficient form of evidence for establishing that status. …
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591965.21245
Contemporary philosophers of mathematics are deadlocked between two alternative ontologies for numbers: Platonism and nominalism. According to contemporary mathematical Platonism, numbers are real abstract objects, i.e. particulars which are nonetheless “wholly nonphysical, nonmental, nonspatial, nontemporal, and noncausal.” While this view does justice to intuitions about numbers and mathematical semantics, it leaves unclear how we could ever learn anything by mathematical inquiry. Mathematical nominalism, by contrast, holds that numbers do not exist extra-mentally, which raises difficulties about how mathematical statements could be true or false. Both theories, moreover, leave inexplicable how mathematics could have such a close relationship with natural science, since neither abstract nor mental objects can influence concrete physical objects.
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599269.212477
We introduce the concepts of the players’second-order productivities in cooperative games with transferable utility (TU games) and of the players’second-order payoffs for one-point solutions for TU games. Second-order productivities are conceptualized as second-order marginal contributions, that is, how one player affects another player’s marginal contributions to coalitions containing neither of them by entering these coalitions. Second-order payoffs are conceptualized as the effect of one player leaving the game on the payoff of another player. We show that the Shapley value is the unique e¢ cient one-point solution for TU games that re‡ects the players’second-order productivities in terms of their second-order payoffs.