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Relevance has become a central concept in the discussion of academic knowledge production, used in the strategies and guidelines of various research-oriented institutions. This article analyses some of the key contemporary tenets in this area. Having conducted a systematic literature review of 113 academic articles, I distinguish eight main ways of referring to relevance in the context of knowledge production. Some accounts focus on how existing knowledge institutions do or could provide users with relevant knowledge, whereas others take a more dynamic approach reflecting on how stakeholder needs should influence knowledge production and what types of institutional structures allow them to do so. This difference corresponds with the characterisation of the science-policy interface either as a two-world (linear) relationship or as one-world intertwined. It is also worth considering how social and policy relevance, for example, stand against each other. These nuances should be recognised given that the concept of relevance is widely used in institutional design and in discussions about the future of academic knowledge production.
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2853560.372524
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I challenge this assumption. I argue that even the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is deterministic—whether it fixes a unique future given the present—can depend on one’s choice of set-theoretic axiom candidates over which there is intractable disagreement. Suppose, as is customary (Earman 1986), that a deterministic theory is one whose mathematical formulation yields a unique solution to its governing equations. Then the question of whether a physical theory is deterministic becomes the question of whether there exists a unique solution to its mathematical model—typically a system of differential equations. I argue that competing axiom candidates extending standard mathematics—in particular, the Axiom of Constructibility (V = L) and large cardinal axioms strong enough to prove Projective Determinacy—can diverge on all the core dimensions of physical determinism. First, they may disagree about whether a given physical system is well-posed, and so whether a solution exists.
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2854242.372544
For those of us who love philosophy, philosophical songs—e.g. from the 21st Century Monads or Hannah Hoffman—can be a lot of fun. Since I’m not in a position to compose such works myself, one of my favorite uses of Suno is to play around with having it add musical backing to philosophical lyrics, with results like my Idealism Theme Song (Return to Eden) and The Curse of Deontology.1 While I find these fun, I can’t really imagine them being philosophically persuasive; they’re more just serving as superficial “pointers” to more in-depth arguments that one might consider later looking into. …
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2957862.372556
Generally speaking, it is seriously wrong to do harm to others. It is also often seriously wrong to allow harm to others. Some nonetheless hold that doing and allowing harm are morally inequivalent. They endorse the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that it is harder to justify doing harm than merely allowing harm, all else being equal. For example, it seems wrong to deflect a lethal threat onto an innocent in order to save oneself, but permissible to allow a lethal threat to reach an innocent in order to save oneself. The DDA naturally accounts for this. But others deny that there is any morally significant difference, arguing that when all else is equalized, doing harm is no worse (nor harder to justify) than allowing harm.
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2957889.372567
The main aim of this paper is to clarify the relation between the divine mind, matter, and finite minds. It has been noted in the secondary literature that Shepherd repeatedly characterizes this relation in emanationist terms (Boyle 2023: 268; LoLordo 2020: 20), such as when she mentions “outgoings” (EPEU: 189, 190, 219) or when she says that “[m] ind and matter; may be considered as having existed eternally, coming forth from him [i.e. God], living in him, and supported by him” (ERCE: 98). However, while LoLordo (2021: 241) thus, correctly I believe, speculates that mind and matter belong to God in some sense, and Boyle (2023: 267) suggests they are some sort of “constant creations,” neither develop these ideas in more detail. In contrast, I spell out this relation by drawing from a distinction by Jennifer McKitrick (2003) to argue that the divine mind is best understood as functioning similarly to a bare or ungrounded disposition, while matter and finite minds are akin to grounded dispositions. In other words, the divine mind, an infinite capacity for consciousness (see §3), is the ultimate causal basis for matter and finite minds and is causally responsible for their existence and persistence. Matter and finite minds, in turn, are both
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2957912.372577
Blame abounds in our everyday lives, perhaps no more so than on social media. With the rise of social networking platforms, we now have access to more information about others’ blameworthy behaviour and larger audiences to whom we can express our blame. But these audiences, while large, are not typically diverse. Just as we tend to gather and share information within online social networks made up of like-minded individuals, much of the moral criticism found on the internet is expressed within groups of agents with similar values and worldviews. Like these epistemic practices, the blaming practices found on social media have also received criticism. Many argue that the blame expressed on the internet is unfitting, excessive, and counterproductive. What accounts for the perniciousness of online blame? And what should be done to address it?
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License doi.org/10.3998/phimp.4064 ophy of literature”; those related to philosophical content in literature (e.g., moral motivation in Steinbeck’s novels), usually dubbed “philosophy in literature”; and finally, those centered on literary forms in which philosophical works are written (e.g. Zhuangzi’s non-sequiturs, Plato’s dialogues), usually dubbed “philosophy as literature.” The aim of this article is to expand the way we understand philosophy in literature. Many literary works address philosophical ideas or find their inspirations from philosophical questions. But the problem with focusing on the way philosophy provides the important content in a literary work is the implicit assumption that literature is to be put in service of philosophical ends. Philosophy is prioritized over liter- 1. Defining ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ and explaining how they might be distinguished from each other are tasks far beyond the scope of this paper.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License doi.org/10.3998/phimp.3806 Suppose you are 40% confident that Candidate X will win in the upcoming election. Then you read a column projecting 80%. If you and the columnist are equally well informed and competent on this topic, how should you revise your opinion in light of theirs? Should you perhaps split the difference, arriving at 60%? Plenty has been written on this topic. Much less studied, however, is the question what comes next. Once you’ve updated your opinion about Candidate X, how should your other opinions change to accommodate this new view? For example, how should you revise your expectations about other candidates running for other seats? Or your confidence that your preferred party will win a majority?
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License doi.org/10.3998/phimp.3416 evidential states giving rise to those credences. As a result, traditional approaches fail to capture the multitude of individual evidential states which can lead to the same group credences. This occurs when we fail to account for dependence among individuals and the resilience of their beliefs. Such omissions are not innocuous: they can underdetermine both the group belief and its updating strategy. We present an approach that allows one to focus instead on appropriately combining evidence, and in particular taking into account any overlaps in information. Once the evidence is properly captured, we will show, a full group distribution can be uniquely established on its basis. From this distribution, we can derive point estimates, intervals, and predictions. We call this the evidence-first method, in part to distinguish our approach from prevailing rules for combining beliefs, which may more accurately be described as credence-first.
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2958164.372617
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License <doi.org/10.3998/phimp.5853 > science. I will argue that it is false. Rational belief need not be proportioned to the evidence. Nor, of course, does it succumb to prejudice and wishful thinking. The evidentialist doctrine is false because it clashes with compelling norms on the dynamics of rational belief. I’m going to illustrate this clash by looking at scenarios in which an agent’s evidence deteriorates over time, revealing less about the world or the agent’s location than their earlier evidence. According to the evidentialist doctrine, the agent’s beliefs should follow their deteriorating evidence: the agent should lose their confidence in propositions for which they used to have good evidence, without having received any contrary evidence. I will argue that the agent should instead follow a “conservative” policy and retain the earlier beliefs.
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Poseidon who has the power to inflict a vengeful wrath. Yet Odysseus is overcome by pride at his own cleverness and shouts his own name from the prow of his ship, carelessly jeopardizing the safety of his crew. The parable of Odysseus and the Cyclops is a uniquely rich and compelling story, but it involves an utterly ordinary kind of failure to respond to reasons: ego eclipses prudence. In this moment, Odysseus is irrational and is responsible for this irrationality. His irrationality stems from the fact that he has violated the rational requirement to respond to his reasons. While we often meet this requirement in everyday life, we also often violate it by failing to respond to reasons due to ego, closed-mindedness, carelessness, or other poor epistemic habits. In such cases, our failures render us irrational.
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robbery is a far more serious crime than larceny, drawing much longer prison sentences. Force is an element of many other crimes. Often, when the realization of a set of conditions that does not include force constitutes a crime, as with larceny, to realize those same conditions with force is to commit a more serious crime. In many jurisdictions, for instance, and controversially, force is what distinguishes rape from lesser forms of sexual assault. Even when a forcibly committed crime is not a more serious crime, it draws greater punishment because force is frequently treated as an aggravating condition for sentencing purposes.
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moment or not at all. Nonetheless, Lessing thought that there is at the disposal of the poet an indirect means to capture the beauty of material objects. Homer would have put it to good use in the Iliad, where the beauty of Helen of Troy was conveyed not by a description of her beauty-making features, but by a description of the effect of her beauty: “What Homer could not describe in detail he makes us understand by the effect: oh! poets paint for us the pleasure, inclination, love, rapture, which beauty causes, and you will have painted beauty itself” (Lessing 1836[1766], ). At the very least, what this passage makes clear is that
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at “trolling.” Trolls often post deliberately inflammatory content with the goal of provoking emotional responses. They aim to trick their targets into mistaking them for good faith interlocutors, thereby “baiting” them into responding in an emotional manner. This is typically done for the troll’s own entertainment, as well as the entertainment of anyone who happens to witness the exchange and recognize it as trolling. Some instances of trolling seem mostly harmless, such as when their contents aren’t ethically problematic and no one takes the bait. However, trolling can also be dangerous. For one thing, empirical studies show that racist and misogynistic trolling can be part of a gradual radicalization into extremist or hateful ideologies (Munn 2019; Hoffman et al. 2020; Rauf 2021; Thorleifsson 2022). Furthermore, when problematic trolls are allowed to run amok, online platforms can gradually become cesspools of hateful speech. So, trolling can contribute to the degradation of both individual trolls’ belief systems and broader online environments.
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2964736.372668
Attitude relations such as belief and knowledge are two-place relations between a subject and a property, an abstract object that may vary in truth value across individuals. Lewis famously argued that self-locating attitudes should lead us to reject propositionalism in favour of proprietism, while Stalnaker argued, to the contrary, that the phenomenon of self-locating attitudes does not motivate rejecting propositionalism. In what follows, we’ll argue that there are good reasons to prefer propositionalism to pro- prietism, and we’ll show that there are natural accounts of self-locating attitudes that one can provide by appeal to the propositional relations of belief and knowledge.
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2979614.372678
This week, 50 category theorists and software engineers working on “safeguarded AI” are meeting in Bristol. They’re being funded by £59 million from ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. …
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(1) My 8-year-old son asked me last week, “daddy, did you hear that GPT-5 is now out?” So yes, I’m indeed aware that GPT-5 is now out! I’ve just started playing around with it. For detailed reports on what’s changed and how impressive it is compared to previous models, see for example Zvi #1, #2, #3. …
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Battisti argues that it is morally problematic to use AI tools for improving the quality of a message sent to a romantic partner as it may no longer authentically reflect one’s personality. If AI is used in this manner, there is a risk that what Battisti refers to as an “authenticity-based obligation” is violated. According to Battisti, authenticity-based obligations are nontransferable because they are inherently tied to specific people. […] the value of the result lies in the person performing the task, that is, in who undertakes the cognitive and emotional process required to bring it about1 While we find the discussion of authenticity-based obligations interesting, we doubt that this is the right criterion to apply in this context, for at least four reasons.
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I present a heretofore untheorised form of lay science, called extitutional science, whereby lay scientists, by virtue of their collective experience, are able to detect errors committed by institutional scientists and attempt to have them corrected. I argue that the epistemic success of institutional science is enhanced to the extent that it takes up this extitutional criticism. Since this uptake does not occur spontaneously, extitutional interference in the conduct of institutional science is required. I make a proposal for how to secure this epistemically beneficial form of lay interference.
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We re-examine the old question to what extent mathematics may be compared with a game. Mainly inspired by Hilbert and Wittgenstein, our answer is that mathematics is something like a “rhododendron of language games”, where the rules are inferential. The pure side of mathematics is essentially formalist, where we propose that truth is not carried by theorems corresponding to whatever independent reality and arrived at through proof, but is defined by correctness of rule-following (and as such is objective given these rules). Gödel’s theorems, which are often seen as a threat to formalist philosophies of mathematics, actually strengthen our concept of truth. The applied side of mathematics arises from two practices: first, the dual nature of axiomatization as taking from heuristic practices like physics and informal mathematics whilst giving proofs and logical analysis; and second, the ability of using the inferential role of theorems to make “surrogative” inferences about natural phenomena. Our framework is pluralist, combining various (non-referential) philosophies of mathematics.
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This paper proposes an alternative to standard first-order logic that seeks greater naturalness, generality, and semantic self-containment. The system removes the first-order restriction, avoids type hierarchies, and dispenses with external structures, making the meaning of expressions depend solely on their constituent symbols. Terms and formulas are unified into a single notion of expression, with set-builder notation integrated as a primitive construct. Connectives and quantifiers are treated as operators among others rather than as privileged primitives. The deductive framework is minimal and intuitive, with soundness and consistency established and completeness examined. While computability requirements may limit universality, the system offers a unified and potentially more faithful model of human mathematical deduction, providing an alternative foundation for formal reasoning.
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3030627.372737
I often find myself thinking that the conventional wisdom in moral philosophy gets a lot of things backwards. For example, I’ve previously discussed how deontology is much more deeply self-effacing (making objectively right actions, and not just bungled attempts to act rightly, lamentable) than consequentialism. …
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3058308.372747
Christopher Devlin Brown’s The Hope and Horror of Physicalism works through different ways of understanding the content of physicalism, evaluates the “existential consequences” of physicalism so understood, and attempts to defend one form of physicalism – “Russellian physicalism” – from consciousness-based objections. I first raise some minor-but-not-too-minor concerns about Brown’s historical account of physicalism. Second, I discuss one version of physicalism (the “theory-based version”) that Brown works with in assessing physicalism’s existential consequences. Third, I raise some questions about Brown’s preferred way of understanding physicalism, which he labels “Russellian physicalism”, and which is a version of “via negativa physicalism”. My discussions are offered in a constructive spirit.
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Some important policies will change future mortality rates (like climate mitigation), change future fertility rates (like public education), or respond to the emerging challenges of global depopulation. Any such policy will change each of the quality of lives, the quantity of lives, and who will live in the future. Hence, to evaluate economic policies, we need to assess both social risk and variable population. A standard principle for economic policy evaluation is Expected Total Utilitarianism, which maximizes the expected value of the sum of individuals’ transformed lifetime well-being. Despite the prominent use in public economics of both additive utilitarianism and expectation-taking under risk, these methods remain questionable in welfare economics, in part because existing axiomatic justifications make strong assumptions (Fleurbaey, 2010; Golosov et al., 2007).
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To celebrate my sons’ graduation from Vanderbilt, I commissioned a custom set of game chips, using images drawn from the bespoke role-playing games we’ve been playing since they were three years old. Since I wanted top quality and consistency, I didn’t use AI. …
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3142017.372778
Recent work on the philosophy of high energy physics experiments has considerably advanced our understanding of their epistemology, for instance concerning measurements by the ATLAS collaboration at the large hadron collider (Beauchemin 2017). In this paper we aim to highlight and analyze complementary low energy ‘tabletop’ experiments in particle (and other kinds of fundamental) physics. In particular, we contrast ATLAS measurements with high precision measurements of the electron magnetic moment. We find, for instance, that the simplicity of the latter experiment allows for uncertainties to be minimized materially, in the very construction of the apparatus. We also sketch how a notion of ‘frugality’ can be used, in light of considerations of simplicity, to understand the value of low energy experiments with respect to the entrenched field of high energy experiment.
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3142061.372788
In a recent paper, Harriet Fagerberg argues that the disease debate in the philosophy of medicine makes little sense as conceptual analysis but instead should proceed on the assumption that disease is a real kind. I propose an alternative view. The history and practice of medicine give us reasons to doubt that the category of disease forms a real kind. Instead, drawing on work by Quill R. Kukla, I argue that the disease debate makes good sense on an understanding of disease as an institutional kind. As well as explaining key features of the disease debate, this can facilitate a philosophical understanding of disease that captures the eclectic scope of medicine and the complex reasons why conditions get classified as diseases.
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3142089.372798
We explore the causes and outcomes of scientific conceptual change using a case study of the development of the individualized niche concept. We outline a framework for characterizing conceptual change that distinguishes between epistemically adaptive and neutral processes and outcomes of conceptual change. We then apply this framework in tracing how the individualized niche concept arose historically out of population niche thinking and how it exhibits plurality within a contemporary biological research program. While the individualized niche concept was developed adaptively to suit new research goals and empirical findings, some of its pluralistic aspects in contemporary research may have arisen neutrally, that is for non-epistemic reasons. We suggest reasons for thinking that this plurality is unproblematic and may become useful, e.g., when it allows for the concept to be applied across differing research contexts.
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3142110.37281
Scientific metaphysics can inform discussions of scientific representation in a number of ways. For instance, even a relatively generic commitment to some minimal form of scientific realism suggests that the targets of scientific representations should serve as source material for one’s scientifically-informed ontology. Historical connections between commitments to realism and commitments to reductive approaches in scientific metaphysics further inform a persistent strain of reductive approach to generating scientific representations. In this discussion, I examine two recent challenges to reductive scientific metaphysics from philosophers working across a variety of scientific domains and philosophical traditions: C. Kenneth Waters’ “No General Structure Thesis” and Robert Batterman’s account of scientific metaphysics built on many-body physics. Each of these accounts has what I shall call “anti-fundamentalist” leanings: they reject the premise that fundamental physical theory is the appropriate or best source material for scientific metaphysics. Following Waters, I contrast these leanings with the methodological approach of contemporary structural realism. Additionally, both Waters’ and Batterman’s accounts foreground the role of scale in defining ontological categories, and both reject the reductionist ideal that the stuff at the smallest scale is the most fundamental, the most general, or the most real. I discuss the implications for scientific representation imparted by anti-fundamentalist approaches that emphasize the role of scale in building a scientifically-informed ontology.
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3142131.372819
The meta-inductive approach to induction justifies induction by proving its optimality. The argument for the optimality of induction proceeds in two steps. The first ‘a priori’ step intends to show that meta-induction is optimal and the second ‘a posteriori’ step intends to show that meta-induction selects object-induction in our world. I critically evaluate the second-step and raise two problems: the identification problem and the indetermination problem. In light of these problems, I assess the prospects of any meta-inductive approach to induction.