-
2483160.70725
Emotions can get things right and serve us in many productive ways. They can also get things wrong and harm our epistemic or practical endeavors. Resenting somebody for having insulted your friend gets it wrong when your friend well understood that the remark was a joke. On the other hand, if your friend is not familiar with the given cultural context and hence couldn’t quite grasp the subtly sexist nature of the joke, your resentment might not only be appropriate but also help her navigate the new social context. Hoping that your meeting with your supervisor will be productive might motivate you to prepare better but will be inappropriate if all your previous meetings were failures.
-
2483188.707356
Besides disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is to split your donations across all of the charities that are recommended by theories in which you have positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to your credence in the theories that recommend it. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already widely used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars, it is not supported by any account of handling decisions under moral uncertainty that has been proposed thus far in the literature. This paper develops a new bargaining-based approach that honors the proportionality intuition. We also show how this approach has several advantages over the best alternative proposals.
-
2483210.707366
In the last half-century increased awareness of modal issues has been brought to bear on the free will debate. It has been argued that the context dependence of possibility claims can be exploited to mount a defence of compatibilism, the idea being that the kind of possibility to do otherwise ruled out by determinism is distinct from the kind of possibility to do otherwise needed for free will. The potency of this idea, however, is still under-appreciated. It is often confused with conditional analyses of alternative possibilities, and many assume that the forms of possibility the compatibilist points to are somehow less “categorical” than the incompatibilist’s preferred all-in possibility. Moreover, Christian List’s questionable agent-level compatibilism has recently become the main representative of the idea. In fact what is needed—so it is argued here—is to combine increased modal awareness with the traditional compatibilist picture of the relevant freedom being freedom from external compulsion.
-
2483262.707373
Contractual inflationists claim that contractual relationships are a source of noninstrumental value in our lives, to be engaged with for their own sake. Some inflationists take this to be the value of “personal detachment.” I argue that though personal detachment can indeed be valuable, that value is not plausibly considered noninstru-mental. Even on the most charitable reading of personal detachment—its potential to emancipate us from traditional social relations—these inflationists overlook that it may just as much lead to domination as traditional society does, only this time, due to alienation under market conditions. To salvage our intuitive sense of the emancipatory potential of contract, we can consider the detachment it makes possible to be a form of technology, casting the value of contract in a “merely” instrumental role. I conclude that if we are to reinvigorate the politics of the appeal to personal detachment in contract theory, we have to deflate its value.
-
2483342.707379
A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2—no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems—a fact which is sometimes spun as a “decision theoretic critique” of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of model-ling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk.
-
2483365.707385
Commemorative artefacts purportedly speak—they communicate messages to their audience, even if no words are uttered. Sometimes, such artefacts purportedly communicate demeaning or pejorative messages about some members of society. The characteristics of such speech are, however, under-examined. I present an account of the paradigmatic characteristics of the speech of commemorative artefacts (or, “commemorative artefactual speech”), as a distinct form of political speech. According to my account, commemorative artefactual speech paradigmatically involves the use of an artefact by an authorised member of a group to declare the importance of remembering a subject, in virtue of some feature of the subject. Then, I outline a variety of ways that commemorative artefactual speech can go awry. Such speech can be unauthorised, involve unfair exclusion or incorrect identification, be aesthetically inadequate, invoke clandestine explanations, and be directed at inappropriate subjects. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my account for resisting problematic commemorative artefactual speech.
-
2483415.707391
Modern generative AI systems have shown the capacity to produce remarkably fluent language, prompting debates both about their semantic understanding and, less prominently, about whether they can perform speech acts. This paper addresses the latter question, focusing on assertion. We argue that to be capable of assertion, an entity must meet two requirements: it must produce outputs with descriptive functions, and it must be capable of being sanctioned by agents with which it interacts. The second requirement arises from the nature of assertion as a norm-governed social practice. Pre-trained large language models that have not been subject to fine-tuning fail to meet the first requirement. Language models that have been fine-tuned for “groundedness” or “correctness” may meet the first requirement, but fail the second. We also consider the significance of the point that AI systems can be used to generate proxy assertions on behalf of human agents.
-
2483437.707396
Skeptical theists contend that human cognitive limitations undermine atheistic arguments from evil. One recent challenge to skeptical theism has been posed by Climenhaga (2025), who argues that if we should—as some skeptical theists argue— be agnostic about the probability of the total collection of evils we observe given theism, Pr(E|T), we should also be agnostic about the probability of theism given these evils, Pr(T|E), and therefore be agnostic with respect to God’s existence. If one is persuaded, as I am, that Climenhaga’s argument is correct, the most promising skeptical theist response available seems to be one of mitigation: concede that Pr(E|T) is not inscrutable—and thereby concede skeptical theism cannot undermine arguments from the total collection of observable evils to the nonexistence of God— but maintain that skeptical theism is still able to undermine other Bayesian problems of evil; namely, those which argue from some individual instance of observable evil to the nonexistence of God. However, as I will argue, this mitigation strategy is not viable: if Pr(Ei|T) is inscrutable, where Pr(Ei|T) is the probability of any individual instance of observable evil occurring given theism, so too is Pr(E|T) correspondingly inscrutable. Therefore, absent demonstrating Climenhaga to be incorrect, skeptical theism cannot undermine any Bayesian arguments from evil.
-
2483458.707402
Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, because it preserves the pleasure of an artwork’s incomprehensibility; the second holds that a lack of artistic understanding is conditionally valuable, as the enabling condition of a finally valuable relationship with an artwork. I defend orthodoxy by arguing that both versions of the objection fail and that we have no general reason against gaining artistic understanding.
-
2483482.707407
Refutation and Imagination Quentin Skinner, Michel Foucault, Raymond Geuss, David Graeber, and Bernard Williams, have recognised the importance of these imaginative resources in shaping methodological reflections. These thinkers are concerned that limiting the relevance of history to normative theorising exposes ahistoricist thinkers to imaginative failures. I argue that this is best construed as a concern about the epistemic reliability of their evaluative judgments. Imaginative failures can introduce biases that unjustifiably restrict the range of solutions to practical collective problems they contemplate. Historical research serves a normative function that is unavailable to the methodologically ahistoricist approach by preventing such failures.
-
2483506.707413
Suppose Socrates is looking at a bright red apple in good viewing conditions, so that it looks to him the colour it is. Schematically, Aristotle’s explanation of this “Good Case” is that the apple looks bright red to Socrates because he has taken on the perceptual form of bright red without the matter. But what happens if Socrates misperceives the apple instead and it looks purple? It is not at all clear how to apply Aristotle’s account of perception to such a “Bad Case.” Does Socrates still take on the perceptual form of the actual—bright red—colour of the apple in the Bad Case? Of purple? Neither? I argue that applying Aristotle’s account of perception to this sort of Bad Case requires that there are different ways of being in perceptual contact with perceptible qualities like the colour of an apple, depending on how that perceptual contact is mediated by changes in the sense organs and perceptual medium.
-
2498309.707418
The poet Blake wrote that you can
Today we’ll see a universe in an atom! We’ll see that states of the hydrogen atom correspond to states of a massless spin-½ particle in the Einstein universe—a closed, static universe where space is a 3-sphere. …
-
2525089.707424
What is the point of inquiry? Some say that the aim of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer; others, that the aim is to attain justified belief, epistemic improvement, or some other coveted epistemic status. Still others eschew “aim” talk altogether, and instead formulate norms governing inquiry. However, virtually all extant work on inquiry has agreed on at least this much: the aims or norms of inquiry can be specified in terms of the epistemic states of the inquirer (i.e., the agent conducting the inquiry). This paper argues that this conception of inquiry struggles to account for some central features of what is arguably the most successful form of inquiry in the modern era: scientific inquiry. We show that scientific inquiry is governed by several distinctive norms that are difficult to explain if inquiry is all about achieving epistemic benefits for the inquirer. Instead, many inquiries aim to confer epistemic benefits on others. This “inclusive” conception of inquiry has important advantages and implications.
-
2538163.70743
As an alternative to the long history of interpreting Artificial Intelligence as the attempt to rationalize and mechanize human ingenuity, thereby transcending nature and its perceived limits, this article proposes an interpretation of the conceptual foundations of Environmental Intelligence as the effort to develop digital technology and data-intensive algorithmic systems to sustain and enhance life on this planet. Thus articulated, EI provides a framework to challenge and redefine the philosophical premises of AI in ways that can explicitly spur the responsible and sustainable development of computational technologies towards public interest goals.
-
2538186.707435
Are absolute representations of reality—i.e., representations of reality from no particular point view—possible? Moore (1997) has offered abstract arguments for the following answer to this question: ‘yes, invariably’. But there are questions regarding whether (and how) this conclusion can be compatible with modern physics, where absolute representations often seem hard to come by. These questions were taken up by Jacobs and Read (2025) in the context of classical spacetime physics; here, we turn our attention to quantum mechanics. In particular, when the arguments of Moore (1997) are brought into contact with the ‘relational quantum mechanics’ of Rovelli (1996) and collaborators, one finds that the latter is unstable: either it is not relational view, or it is not a realist view.
-
2538209.707441
Disruptive technologies are a key theme in economics, the philosophy of technology, and situated cognition - yet these debates remain largely disconnected. This paper addresses four core questions that cut across them: (i) What, precisely, are disruptive technologies “disrupting” across the different contexts in which the literature situates them? (ii) Why do technological disruptions play such prominent roles, in multiple domains, concerning the development of our species, cultures, and personal lives? (iii) Are technological disruptions inherently beneficial or harmful, and how are potential benefits and harms brought about? (iv) What strategies are available for adaptation to disruptive technologies, and how accessible are they for different groups and individuals? To unify current debates and provide a conceptual and normative foundation for future research, we draw on niche construction theory. We argue that disruptive technologies are technological niche disruptions (TENDs) that occur at various spatiotemporal scales. TENDs pressure social groups and individuals to adapt. As the abilities and resources that adaptation requires are often unevenly distributed, so are the harms and benefits TENDs produce. TENDs, therefore, both reflect and sustain existing inequalities.
-
2538237.707447
This chapter compares Andreas and G ünther’s (forthcoming) epochetic analysis of actual causation to the currently popular counterfactual accounts. The primary focus will be on the shortcomings of the counterfactual approach to causation. But we will also explain the motivation behind counterfactual accounts and how the counterfactual approach has successively moved away from its core idea in response to recalcitrant counterexamples. The upshot is that our epochetic analysis tallies better with our causal judgments than the counterfactual accounts. A comparison to counterfactual accounts at manageable length must be selective. For reasons of systematicity, we have chosen Lewis’s (1973a) analysis of causation in terms of chains of difference-making, Yablo’s (2002) account in terms of de facto dependence, and the causal model accounts of Hitchcock (2001), Halpern and Pearl (2005), Halpern (2015), Halpern (2016), and Gallow (2021). The latter may be seen as the current culmination of the counterfactual approach and the strongest competitor to our epochetic analysis. This is why we devoted a rather long section on Gal-low’s theory towards the end of this chapter.
-
2596002.707463
Inertia has long been treated as the paradigm of natural motion. This paper challenges this identification through the lens of General Relativity. By refining Norton (2012)’s distinction between idealisation and approximation and drawing on key insights from Tamir ( ) regarding the theorems and proofs of Einstein and Grommer (1927), Geroch and Jang ( ), Geroch and Traschen (1987) and Ehlers and Geroch (2004), I argue that geodesic motion—commonly taken as the relativistic counterpart of inertial motion—qualifies as neither an approximation nor an idealisation. Rather, geodesic motion is best understood as a useful construct—a formal artefact of the theory’s geometric structure, lacking both real and fictitious instantiation, and ultimately excluded by the dynamical structure of General Relativity. In place of inertial motion, I develop a layered account of natural motion, which is not encoded in a single ‘master equation of motion’. Extended, structured, and backreacting bodies require dynamical formalisms of increasing refinement that systematically depart from geodesic motion. This pluralist framework displaces inertial motion as the privileged expression of pure gravitational motion, replacing it with a dynamically grounded hierarchy of approximations fully consistent with the Einstein field equations.
-
2612742.70747
In Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop, Jack Devanney explains that pessimistic estimates of the danger of nuclear power rests on the assumption of linear harm: double the radiation, double the harm. This linear assumption is blatantly wrong at high doses, because humans exposed to sufficiently high doses die with certainty, and you can’t double-die. …
-
2632065.707475
We introduce a challenge designed to evaluate the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in performing mathematical induction proofs, with a particular focus on nested induction. Our task requires models to construct direct induction proofs in both formal and informal settings, without relying on any preexisting lemmas. Experimental results indicate that current models struggle with generating direct induction proofs, suggesting that there remains significant room for improvement.
-
2640220.707481
On its surface, a sentence like If Laura becomes a zombie, she wants you to shoot her looks like a plain conditional with the attitude want in its consequent. However, the most salient reading of this sentence is not about the desires of a hypothetical zombie- Laura. Rather, it asserts that the actual, non-zombie Laura has a certain restricted attitude: her present desires, when considering only possible states of affairs in which she becomes a zombie, are such that you shoot her. This can be contrasted with the shifted reading about zombie-desires that arises with conditional morphosyntax, e.g., If Laura became a zombie, she would want you to shoot her. Furthermore, as Blumberg and Holguín (J Semant 36(3):377–406, 2019) note, restricted attitude readings can also arise in disjunctive environments, as in Either a lot of people are on the deck outside, or I regret that I didn’t bring more friends. We provide a novel analysis of restricted and shifted readings in conditional and disjunctive environments, with a few crucial features. First, both restricted and shifted attitude conditionals are in fact “regular” conditionals with attitudes in their consequents, which accords with their surface-level appearance and contrasts with Pasternak’s (The mereology of attitudes, Ph.D. thesis, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 2018) Kratzerian approach, in which the if -clause restricts the attitude directly. Second, whether the attitude is or is not shifted—i.e., zombie versus actual desires—is dependent on the presence or absence of conditional morphosyntax. And third, the restriction of the attitude is effected by means of aboutness, a concept for which we provide two potential Kai von Fintel and Robert Pasternak are listed alphabetically and share joint lead authorship of this work.
-
2664465.707486
Scott Aaronson’s Brief Foreword:
Harvey Lederman is a distinguished analytic philosopher who moved from Princeton to UT Austin a few years ago. Since his arrival, he’s become one of my best friends among the UT professoriate. …
-
2692588.707491
In this chapter, I re!ect on my career to date and my current thinking on the core topics of this volume: values, pluralism, and pragmatism in science and philosophy of science. Since I am, I hope, merely in the middle rather than the end of my career, this is not a retrospective but a mediospective, if you will, though I will begin with retrospective re!ections and end with prospective ones. Happily, there are many opportunities to reference and engage with the excellent contributions to this volume in the course of things, to discuss what I have learned from my generous colleagues as well as indicate the very few places where our views differ.
-
2710326.707498
I recall being baffled, as an undergraduate student, by the debates over epistemic vs practical reasons for belief: “If the fate of the world depended on it, who could deny that having the world-saving belief was more important than having an epistemically rational belief?” I only later realized that of course nobody does deny that. …
-
2711322.707504
In this article, I develop the idea of theoretical complexes to characterize large-scale theoretical movements in the cognitive sciences, such as classical computational cognitivism, connectionism, embodied cognition, and predictive processing. It is argued that these theoretical movements should be construed as groups of closely connected individual theories and models of cognitive processes that share similar general hypotheses about the nature of cognition. General hypotheses form conceptual cores of complexes of cognitive theories, giving them their structure and functional properties. The latter are said to consist primarily of helping practitioners of theoretical complexes further develop their individual accounts of cognitive phenomena. It is claimed that the theoretical diversity fostered in this way has already benefited the cognitive sciences in a number of important ways and has the potential to further advance the field.
-
2711379.707509
It is a widespread consensus among metaphysicians that the bundle and substratum theories are substantially different metaphysical theories of individuality. In a realist stance towards metaphysics, they cannot both track the truth when describing fundamental reality, thus they’re rival metaphysical theories. Against that consensus, Jiri Benovsky has advanced a metametaphysical thesis that they are in fact metaphysically equivalent. This paper challenges Benovsky’s equivalence thesis with two counter-arguments based on the metaphysics of quantum mechanics: quantum metaphysical indeterminacy and wavefunction realism. As we shall argue, while both substratum and bundle theories arguably fail in standard quantum mechanics, they fail in different ways. Hence, given Benovsky’s own notion of metaphysical equivalence, they are not equivalent.
-
2755275.707515
Today I want to make a little digression into the quaternions. We won’t need this for anything later—it’s just for fun. But it’s quite beautiful. We saw in Part 8 that if we take the spin of the electron into account, we can think of bound states of the hydrogen atom as spinor-valued functions on the 3-sphere. …
-
2810573.707521
Learning not to be so embarrassed by my ignorance and failures. Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
-
2935617.707526
The famous Catholic pilgrimage site at Lourdes, France, until fairly recently displayed hundreds of discarded crutches as testament to miraculous cures. It has, though, never displayed a wooden leg. Hence the Wooden Leg Problem (WLP) for believers in miracles: if God can cure paralysis, why does He seem never to have given an amputee back their lost limb? The WLP is a severe challenge for believers in miracles and must be confronted head-on. Yet there does not appear to be any systematic analysis of the problem, at least as formulated here, in the literature on miracles or philosophy of religion generally. I discuss ten possible solutions to the WLP on behalf of the believer in miracles. Although some are stronger than others, all but the final one seem too weak to solve the problem. It is the final one – the ‘how do you know?’ solution – that I endorse and examine in some depth. This solution, I argue, shows that the WLP does not move the epistemological dial when it comes to belief or disbelief in miracles.
-
2940262.707534
Subsumption theodicies aim to subsume apparent cases of natural evil under the category of moral evil, claiming that apparently natural evils result from the actions or omissions of free creatures. Subsumption theodicies include Fall theodicies, according to which nature was corrupted by the sins of the first humans (Aquinas 1993, Dembski 2009), demonic-action theodicies, according to which apparently natural evils are caused by the actions of fallen angels (Lewis 1944, Plantinga 1974, Johnston 2023), and simulation theodicies, according to which our universe is a computer simulation, with its apparent natural evils caused by the free actions of simulators in the next universe up (Dainton 2020, Crummett 2021).