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33116.024394
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) is active on Earth today, is taboo in academia, but the assumptions behind this taboo are faulty. Advances in biology have rendered the notion that complex life is rare in our Galaxy improbable. The objection that no ETC would come to Earth to hide from us does not consider all possible alien motives or means. For an advanced ETC, the convergent instrumental goals of all rational agents – self-preservation and the acquisition of resources – would support the objectives of removing existential threats and gathering strategic and non-strategic information.
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63337.024487
Concept formation has recently become a widely discussed topic in philosophy under the headings of “conceptual engineering”, “conceptual ethics”, and “ameliorative analysis”. Much of this work has been inspired either by the method of explication or by ameliorative projects. In the former case, concept formation is usually seen as a tool of the sciences, of formal disciplines, and of philosophy. In the latter case, concept formation is seen as a tool in the service of social progress. While recent philosophical discussions on concept formation have addressed natural sciences such as physics as well as various life sciences, so far there is only little direct engagement with the social sciences. To address this shortcoming is important because many debates about socially relevant concepts such as power, gender, democracy, risk, justice, or rationality, may best be understood as engaging in conceptual engineering. This topical collection addresses the nature and structure of concept formation in the natural, the life, and the social sciences alike, both as a process taking place within science and as an activity that aims at a broader impact in society. This helps to understand how concept formation proceeds not only in the natural sciences but also in disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, political science, sociology and economics.
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120195.024499
Nietzsche’s first book was entitled The Birth of Tragedy out
of the Spirit of Music (1872), and one of his very last works was
called The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem (1888). As this simple fact indicates, reflection on art (and especially, on
music and drama) is an abiding and central feature of
Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed, very nearly all of his works
address aesthetic questions at least in passing. Some of these
questions are familiar from the philosophical tradition: e.g., how
should we explain the effect tragedy has on us? What is the relation
of aesthetic value to other kinds of value?
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381281.024508
It now seems the switch of Cancel Culture has only two settings:
- everything is cancellable—including giving intellectual arguments against specific DEI policies, or teaching students about a Chinese filler word (“ne-ge”) that sounds a little like the N-word, or else
- nothing is cancellable—not even tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,” shortly before getting empowered to remake the US federal government. …
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401482.024516
This post is free for all, so feel free to share it widely if you feel so inclined. And please ‘like’ it via the heart below and restack it on notes if you get something out of it. It’s the best way to help others find my work. …
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427495.024524
In our paper, “The reference of proper names” (2018), we raised and rebutted the “New-Meaning” objection to our methodology. Our rebuttal rested on theoretical considerations and experimental results. In “Do the Gödel vignettes involve a new descriptivist meaning?”, Nicolò D’Agruma provides an interesting argument against our theoretical considerations (but does not address the experimental evidence). Our present paper argues against D’Agruma. So, our original rebuttal of the objection still stands. We offer further evidence against the objection.
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494553.024537
In this Special Issue, we explore the rise of non-empirical physics from a historical perspective. This exercise is meant, furthermore, as an attempt to open new pathways in contemporary history and philosophy of physics. We use this introduction to provide the theoretical background necessary to flesh out this program and to appreciate the manner in which the articles in the collection substantiate it. To do this, we proceed in the following manner. First, we briefly lay out the development of contemporary philosophy of physics, and the manner in which the range of topics covered in the specialized literature expanded over the past few decades. After that, we chronicle the advent of non-empirical physics during the second half of the twentieth century, and we introduce the philosophical debates triggered by this development. These debates, as we show, did introduce new topics of discussion in philosophy of physics. However, these discussions did not arise as a deliberate attempt to add new ideas to the philosophy of physics repertoire. Instead, they emerged as a natural consequence of the historical development of physics itself. Taking this observation as our starting point, we argue that engaging with the debates around non-empirical physics, and with the historical circumstances behind their appearance, provides a more fruitful, more historically grounded approach towards updating the canon of philosophy of physics. We then single out some areas in which historical work would be particularly illuminating, and we highlight the contributions made by each of our authors. We conclude by inviting others to join the philosophical program sketched here, and to add their own insights to the ones contained in this Special Issue.
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494605.024546
In On Madness: Understanding the Psychotic Mind, published in 2022, Richard G.T. Gipps embarks on a philosophical exploration of psychosis. Generally speaking, Gipps’s book presents an approach he calls “apophatic psychopathology” (Gipps 2022, 2), borrowing from negative (that is, apophatic) theology and its method of understanding God’s nature by seeing how it defeats the predication of even those most supreme qualities we are drawn to predicate of Him. Gipps’s central insight regarding psychotic phenomena is that we best come to understand them not positively, by predicating of the psychotic subject this or that rationally intelligible, intentional state, but instead negatively, through seeing how such predications are here defeated. Sitting down with a person suffering from psychosis requires that we develop the capacity to stay with them in their brokenness, rather than projecting onto them an intentional structure that their illness has abrogated. Gipps comments critically on the relativistic tendencies we encounter these days, concluding that people suffering from severe psychosis are not happily thought of as just living in an “alternative reality” as good as the one populated by nonpsychotic people.
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609958.024554
The recent Oscar-nominated lm Maestro, both starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, concerns the personal life of composer, conductor, and polymath Leonard Bernstein. On the one hand, it depicts a life-long love story between Bernstein and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre. On the other, it is a story about Bernstein’s desire for and a airs with di erent men throughout his life. I thought about this lm and the role of sexuality in Bernstein’s life while reading Of Maybugs and Men: A History and Philosophy of the Sciences of Homosexuality by Pieter Adriaens and Andreas de Block.
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609976.024564
Valde, K. [2024]: ‘Stavros Ioannidis and Stathis Psillos’s Mechanisms in Science’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 In Mechanisms in Science: Method or Metaphysics? Ioannidis and Psillos o er a metaphysically minimal account of the concept of mechanism as it is used in science. They believe that what scientists mean when they talk about mechanisms can be adequately captured by what they call ‘causal mechanism’: ‘a mechanism is a causal pathway described in theoretical language’ (p. 3). Simply put, they argue that mechanism in science is a methodology, not an ontology. The larger aim of the book is to defend this claim on the grounds of both metaphysics and the practices of science.
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610009.024573
Wol , J. [2024]: ‘Nina Emery’s Naturalism beyond the Limits of Science’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 Nina Emery’s book Naturalism beyond the Limits of Science is an exciting and much needed contribution to the ongoing debate over naturalistic metaphysics. The return of metaphysics—understood as the philosophical study of what the world is like—has prompted di cult questions about the relationship of this branch of philosophy to science, which is arguably our best way of addressing questions about what the world is like. Are metaphysicians o ering an alternative to scienti c theories about the world, is their work complementary, or should they feel constrained by our best scienti c theories? Emery frames these questions as a dilemma: either metaphysicians and scientists are doing the same thing, in which case, ‘what is the point of doing metaphysics at all?’ (p. 3); or else metaphysicians are doing something substantially di erent, in which case, ‘metaphysics starts to seem like a pretty mysterious enterprise’ (p. 3).
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610065.024582
In his paper ‘The Road since Structure’ ([1991]), the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn emphasized the parallels between his own theory of scienti c development and biological evolution. His theory had been introduced almost thirty years before, in 1962, in the well-known book The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions. Three decades later, Kuhn showed that scienti c revolutions—those episodes in which a certain community of experts leaves behind a set of paradigmatic problems and problem-solutions to adopt a new one—split the scienti c community into two or more sub-groups, each of which in turn devotes its e orts to developing new problem-solutions for new problems. Scienti c development has thus the appearance of ‘a layman’s diagram for a biological evolutionary tree’ (Kuhn [1991], p. 98). Each new branch in that tree usually deals with increasingly specialized issues with increasing success, and this is part of the evidence of scienti c progress. Communication between these specialities tends to be limited. Kuhn’s lexical theory helped to show why, and provided reason to think of this limitation as a welcome consequence.
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610106.024591
Recently, Alvarado (2024) provided a conceptual framework to individuate and identify a specific kind of loneliness, namely epistemic loneliness. According to him, epistemic loneliness arises in virtue of and responds primarily to an absence of epistemic partners— i.e., willing, able, and actually engaged epistemic peers — as well as the lack of opportunities to engage with such. In this paper I argue that Alvarado’s framework and conceptual analysis of epistemic loneliness allows us to identify yet another kind of loneliness, namely one that can only be addressed at an axiological level. As we will see, this loneliness arises in virtue of and is particularly responsive to value-affirming, value-creating, and value exchanging circumstances, peers and contexts. Given its source and the factors which have an effect on it (either increase it or decrease it), this kind of loneliness is significantly distinct from epistemic loneliness. As will be shown here, we can have axiologically antagonistic epistemic partners. If this is so, it is possible that one can have epistemic partners, in the sense defined by Alvarado, and still be axiologically lonely. Axiological loneliness may prove to be even more central than epistemic loneliness already is to a person’s social, psychological and personal sense of belonging and hence of well-being.
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654302.024599
|Source|
Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem? The science is clear and not really in question. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is well-understood (and has been known for over a century). …
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686358.024607
What’s a poor reviewer to do? Skimming the advance proofs of a well-promoted book by a noted expert, you discover that its reasoning is full of holes—or rather, is one cavernous hole, a Grand Canyon of fallacy, camouflaged by science and slick prose. …
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702875.024614
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say “this is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. —Rousseau How does one come to acquire property, that is, rightful ownership in something that was previously unowned and, by so doing, exclude all others from its rightful use? The distinction between mine and thine also creates the distinction between use and theft and, as Rousseau noted, is the true source of human inequality (1755, 69). One prominent answer to this question is that one can rightfully acquire ownership of something that was previously unowned by improving it through one’s labor. One can come to own an unowned plot of land, for instance, by farming or building on the land. The classic philosophical source for this view is Locke’s 2nd Treatise on Government. There, Locke argues that since we own ourselves and our labor, once we “mix” our labor with a thing, we make it our own.
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702890.024622
The adoption of formal and empirical tools has become commonplace in mainstream philosophy. The analytic revolution at the beginning of the last century was born largely out of advances in formal logic, which exposed and clarified a new set of philosophical problems. As philosophical questions increasingly overlapped with questions in cognitive science and linguistics, tools from those disciplines also became more common in philosophy. Many of the early innovators in decision theory and game theory were also philosophers (e.g., John Harsanyi, Richard Jeffrey, David Lewis) and those tools were quickly seen as important in philosophical investigation. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the empirical methods of the social and natural sciences, especially their most powerful method—randomized experiments—were slow to be adopted, only becoming widespread in the early part of the 21st century. It is too soon to say that experimental philosophy has transitioned from a topic to a commonly accepted tool, but it is certainly more common deployed and accepted as legitimate than it was 20 years ago.
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702907.02463
Agreement is at the heart of many theories of political justification, most notably in social contract theories.¹ In its most general form, political contractualism is the view that political life’s fundamental principles, norms, or rules are justified because they can garner public agreement in some form. The problem I will identify and attempt to remedy in this chapter is one common to theories of political contractualism. It is found in contractual theories, not because of any distinctive defect in contractual theories; rather, the issue is a general one in political philosophy that is easier to diagnose in these theories, because they wear their justificatory structure on their sleeve. They raise the justificatory bar explicitly in ways that most other theories do not.
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702949.024639
ustice, ohn Rawls famously argued, is the first virtue of social institutions. ustice, in this sense, structures social cooperation. More precisely, principles of ustice provide a framework for evaluating the social rules that govern society, understood as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage (Rawls 1971, 4). As he puts it, a set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares (4). Principles of ustice structure the basic rights, the duties, and the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life. ustice is a solution to a fundamental problem in political philosophy. The exercise of political power involves coercion. In a society of free and equal citizens, coercion needs ustification to distinguish it from mere force. There are two classic solutions to this problem. Both rely on ustifying the use of political power, but they rely on different sources of that ustification. One ustifies the use of political coercion by referencing an end that the exercise of such power is meant to fulfill. Politics is ustified insofar as it achieves or aims at some otherwise valuable or attractive situation for society. This can take many forms, but from Plato to Rawls, one common goal is ustice, or a ust society. Insofar as political power is used in pursuit of ustice, its legitimacy is secure.
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766342.024646
Game theorists and foreign policy analysts have known for long that it sometimes pays off to make others believe that you’re irrational or even “mad.” To understand why, consider the general structure of what can be called the Commitment Problem:
(i) You would want (because this is in your interest) that Other does X. …
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817926.024653
Humans are a di erent kind of animal. Our species has a bigger ecological range, cooperates on larger scales, and makes greater use of tools than any other vertebrate species. Many scholars argue that these novel features of human biology are the result of enhanced cognitive ability, especially the ability to create causal explanations of natural phenomena. An alternative hypothesis holds that cumulative cultural evolution has a central role, and that causal reasoning plays a secondary role. This chapter reviews this debate arguing that there are a range of models that di er about the role of causal reasoning, trial-and-error learning, and biased cultural learning. It then presents a laboratory study that indicates that cumulative cultural evolution can occur without causal understanding and an eld study among Hadza hunter-gatherers that shows that the design of an essential foraging tool does not depend on a complete understanding of the costs and bene ts of alternative designs.
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840736.024661
The validity of a virtual human-based research methodology, in which simulated humans are used to generate knowledge about real humans, depends on substantiating multiple correspondence claims which are currently indefensible. One must substantiate that real and virtual humans are sufficiently similar with respect to their (1) control structures, (2) environments and embodied experiences, (3) adaptive histories and attunements, (4) social and cultural contexts, and (5) institutional contexts. If one’s confidence in any of these correspondences is undermined, then the foundation of this approach will crumble.
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840757.024669
What is active touch? A common conception of active touch gives a rough but rather intuitive sketch. That is, active touch can be understood as mainly object-oriented, controlled movement. While parts or the totality of this characterization is espoused by an important number of researchers on touch, I will argue that this conception faces important challenges when we pay close attention to each of its features. I hold that active touch should be considered as before all else purposive. This view has its roots in the active sensing literature in robotics but will be amended to give insight into human touch in the natural world.
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956229.024676
Several philosophers of science have taken inspiration from biological research on niches to conceptualise scientific practice. We systematise and extend three niche-based theories of scientific practice: conceptual ecology, cognitive niche construction, and scientific niche construction. We argue that research niches are a promising conceptual tool for understanding complex and dynamic research environments, which helps to investigate relevant forms of agency and material and social interdependencies, while also highlighting their historical and dynamic nature. To illustrate this, we develop a six-point framework for conceptualising research niches. Within this framework, research niches incorporate multiple and heterogenous material, social and conceptual factors (multi-dimensionality); research outputs arise, persist and differentiate through interactions between researchers and research niches (processes); researchers actively respond to and construct research niches (agency); research niches enable certain interactions and processes and not others (capability); and research niches are defined in relation to particular entities, such as individual researchers, disciplines, or concepts (relationality), and in relation to goals, such as understanding, solving problems, intervention, or the persistence of concepts or instruments (normativity).
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1020563.024685
Preliminary Note: The following is very speculative! I’ve been writing occasionally on AI here, especially about how the advent of AI may change our conception of ourselves as agents (here, here, and here). …
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1069235.024692
I consider applications of “AI extenders” to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and preferences—and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion.
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1071563.024699
The article summarizes the present state of research into the conceptual foundations of the periodic table. We give a brief historical account of the development of the periodic table and periodic system, including the impact of modern physics due to the discoveries of Moseley, Bohr, modern quantum mechanics etc. The role of the periodic table in the debate over the reduction of chemistry is discussed, including the attempts to derive the Madelung rule from first principles. Other current debates concern the concept of an “element” and its dual role as simple substance and elementary substance and the question of whether elements and groups of elements constitute natural kinds. The second of these issues bears on the question of further debates concerning the placement of certain elements like H, He, La and Ac in the periodic table.
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1090113.024707
A recent interviewer asked Tyler Cowen to explain falling birth rates, and he puckishly responded, “Do you have kids?” His point: Anyone who knows what kids are actually like can instantly understand why adults are reluctant to have them. …
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1244562.024714
The advancement of and prospects for stem cell research raise a number of specific ethical issues. While navigating the ethical landscape of stem cell research is often challenging for biology researchers and biotechnology innovators, it is also difficult for the public and other persons of concern (from ethicists to policymakers) to grasp the technicalities of a burgeoning field that develops in many directions. Organoids are one of these new biotechnological constructs that are currently eliciting a rich debate in bioethics. In this guide, we argue that different types of organoids have different emerging properties with different ethical implications. Going from general properties to particular ones, we propose a typology of organoid technology and other associated biotechnology from a philosophical and ethical perspective. We point to relevant ethical issues and try to convey the sense of uncertainty peculiar to ongoing research and emerging technological objects.
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1302222.024721
The range of animal practices potentially classified as medical varies widely both functionally and mechanistically, and there is no agreed upon definition of medicine that can help determine which cases ought to count as such. In this paper, we argue that all available definitions are fatally flawed and defend our own characterisation of medicine, which incorporates both functional and mechanistic constraints. We apply our definition to the available evidence and determine which animal behaviours show a mere difference of degree with paradigmatic medical practices—and should thus be seen as medicine proper—and which should be excluded from this nomenclature.