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46240.459631
A light form of value realism is defended according to which objective properties of comparison objects make value comparisons true or false. If one object has such a better-making property and another lacks it, this is sufficient for the truth of a corresponding value comparison. However, better-making properties are only necessary and usually not sufficient parts of the justifications of value comparisons. The account is not reductionist; it remains consistent with error-theoretic positions and the view that there are normative facts.
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81737.459899
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published April 5, 2022. In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the suggestion made by the philosopher Paul Weithman about a possible Rawlsian account of the populist vote. …
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147817.459915
Has the “abandon significance” movement in statistics trickled down into philosophy of science? A little bit. Nowadays (since the late 1990’s [i]), probabilistic inference and confirmation enter in philosophy by way of fields dubbed formal epistemology and Bayesian epistemology. …
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154919.459927
Ethics is easy when autonomy and beneficence converge: of course people should be allowed to do good things.1 And I’m enough of a Millian to think that in general, promoting human capacities and individual autonomy may be our most robustly secure route to creating a better future. …
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187208.459938
In this work I defend moral realism, the thesis that there are objective moral truths, by defending “epistemic realism.” Epistemic realism is the thesis that epistemic judgments, e.g., judgments that some belief is epistemically reasonable, or justified, or known or should be held, are sometimes true and made true by stance-independent epistemic facts and properties.
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221589.459948
A recent dispute in political science raises issues about the objectivity of measures of democracy. Political scientists Little and Meng argue that democracy indices using country experts as coders show a greater degree of democratic backsliding than measures that are objective. They worry that this discrepancy may reflect coder bias. I distinguish three aspects of objectivity and offer a reconceptualization of objectivity as coherence objectivity. I argue that coherence objectivity is better suited for evaluating measures of social science concepts like democracy than the understanding of objectivity implicit in Little and Meng’s discussion.
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293858.45996
According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. More formally: (PAP) necessarily, for any person S and any action A, S is morally responsible for performing A only if there is some action A* such that S could have done A* while failing to do A.
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415107.45998
According to subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI), whether S knows that p depends not only on the subject’s epistemic position (the presence of a true belief, sufficient warrant, etc.) but also on non-epistemic factors present in the subject’s situation; such factors are seen as “encroaching” on the subject’s epistemic standing. Not the only such non-epistemic factor but the most prominent one consists in the subject’s practical stakes. Stakes-based SSI holds that two subjects can be in the same epistemic position with respect to some proposition but with different stakes for the two subjects so that one of them might know the proposition while the other might fail to know it. It is remarkable that the notion of stakes has not been discussed much in great detail at all so far. This paper takes a closer look at this notion and proposes a detailed, new analysis. It turns out that there is more than one kind of stakes, namely event-stakes, knowledge-stakes and action-stakes. I discuss several issues that even plausible notions of stakes raise and propose solutions.
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603937.459993
TLDR: You’re unsure about something. Then it happens—and you think to yourself, “I kinda expected that.” Such hindsight bias is commonly derided as irrational. But any Bayesian who is (1) unsure of exactly what they think, and (2) trusts their own judgment should exhibit hindsight bias. …
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694522.460004
A number of philosophers hold that some types of mental states are composed of two or more mental states. It is commonly thought, for instance, that hoping involves the desire for some outcome to occur and the belief that such an outcome is possible (but has yet to occur). Although the existence of combinatory states (CS’s) is widely accepted, one issue that has not been thoroughly discussed is how we know we token a given combinatory state. This paper aims to fill this lacuna. I do so by first discussing one way of knowing our CS’s—namely, by knowing we token the relevant constituting states, and then inferring that we have the relevant CS from such a knowledge-base. I argue that while anti-skeptics of self-knowledge should embrace the view that we can know our CS’s in this manner, this way of knowing we possess such states is quite demanding. Given the latter, I proceed to examine whether there are alternative ways we can know our CS’s. I defend the view that given the tenability of particular accounts of self-knowledge for non-CS’s, we can avoid the view that we only know our CS’s by in part knowing the constituents of such states.
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694618.460015
People report believing weird things: that the Earth is flat, that senior Democrats are subjecting kidnapped children to abuse, and so on. How can people possibly believe things like this? Some philosophers have recently argued for a surprising answer: people don’t believe these things at all. Rather, they mistake their imaginings for beliefs. They are shmelievers, not believers. In this paper, I consider the prospects for this kind of explanation. I argue that some belief reports are simply insincere, and that much of the evidence for shmeliefs can be explained by the content of the beliefs reported, rather than by the attitude people take to them. But some reported beliefs are good candidates for being shmeliefs. I consider how shmeliefs are acquired and sustained, and why they might be harmful despite not being seriously believed.
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734916.460026
Most philosophers agree that lies are assertions. Most also agree that to presuppose information is different from asserting it. In a series of papers, Viebahn (2020), (2021), along with an empirical study in Viebahn, Wiegmann, Engelmann, and Williemsen (2021), has recently argued that one can lie with presuppositions, and therefore one can assert that p by presupposing that p. The latter conclusion is a rejection of a cornerstone of modern philosophy of language and linguistics, and as such we should require strong reasons for accepting it. I argue here that the reasons for thinking that presuppositions can be lies are too weak to motivate giving up either the view that lies are assertions or the traditional distinction between presuppositions and assertions.
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1022616.460036
Sometimes, stakes are high. Plausible examples include:
Climate change could be very bad (and very likely will be significantly bad—well worth mitigating, even on relatively optimistic forecasts). As longtermists rightly point out, astronomical opportunity costs would make human extinction the worst thing ever, so it’s very well worth investing in reasonable precautions regarding AI, biosecurity, nuclear diplomacy, etc. …
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1072958.460047
Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is understood—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within the development literature. In this paper, I put forward an account of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that poverty essentially involves being in a context in which a reasonable agent’s future-directed agency is systemically undermined. Centering this dimension of poverty allows us to attend to aspects of poverty that are easily overlooked on existing accounts.
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1210406.460058
Preliminary note: This essay is the last one before my summer break. The newsletter will not stop completely, though. See at the end of the post for more information. A couple of weeks ago, Eric Schliesser published an essay on Gerald Gaus’s criticism of Isaiah Berlin’s account of value pluralism. …
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1299669.460068
Chairman of the KPA Group;
Senior Research Fellow, the Samuel Neaman Institute, Technion, Haifa;
Chairman, Data Science Society, Israel
What’s happening in statistical practice since the “abandon statistical significance” call
This is a retrospective view from experience gained by applying statistics to a wide range of problems, with an emphasis on the past few years. …
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1349211.460273
I consider two possible evidentialist responses to Schmidt. According to the first, all of the reason-giving work in the relevant cases is being done by evidence. According to the second, even if the ‘incoherence fact’ sometimes provides a reason, what it provides a reason for is not a doxastic attitude, or at least not one that is an alternative to belief. I argue that the first response is not satisfying, but the second is defensible.
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1433337.460288
I argue that dimensional analysis provides an answer to a skeptical challenge to the theory of model mediated measurement. The problem arises when considering the task of calibrating a novel measurement procedure, with greater range, to the results of a prior measurement procedure. The skeptical worry is that the agreement of the novel and prior measurement procedures in their shared range may only be apparent due to the emergence of systematic error in the exclusive range of the novel measurement procedure. Alternatively: what if the two measurement procedures are not in fact measuring the same quantity? The theory of model mediated measurement can only say that we assume that there is a common quantity. In contrast, I show that the satisfaction of dimensional homogeneity across the metrological extension is independent evidence for the so-called assumption. This is illustrated by the use of dimensional analysis in high pressure experiments. This results in an extension of the theory of model mediated measurement, in which a common quantity in metrological extension is no longer assumed, but hypothesized.
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1472291.460299
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is said to pose many risks, be they catastrophic, existential and otherwise. This paper discusses whether the notion of risk can apply to AGI, both descriptively and in the current regulatory framework. The paper argues that current definitions of risk are ill-suited to capture supposed AGI existential risks, and that the risk-based framework of the EU AI Act is inadequate to deal with truly general, agential systems.
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1593190.461343
This paper seeks to determine a rational agent’s evidential constraints given her beliefs. Rationality is here construed as adherence to a principle of entropy maximisation. I determine the rational agent’s set of probability efunctions compatible with the evidence, ? , given the maximum entropy function and given some constraints on the shape of ? . I also consider agents employing a centre of mass approach to form their beliefs rather than entropy maximisation.
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1606339.461382
In any standard reference text on expected utility theory one will find representation theorems (for example, [27], [13], [35]). These theorems link expected utility maximization to a qualitative description of an agent’s choice behavior. Typically an agent’s choice behavior is captured by a preference relation ⪯ on the set of decisions they face (in our above example this is the set of gambles, but preferences might instead be defined on acts which have no intrinsic probabilities). We say that P ⪯ Q if and only if the agent deems Q to be at least as desirable as P . We then prove something of the form: the preference relation satisfies a given set of axioms if and only if there exists a utility function (and, in some cases, a probability measure) such that the agent prefers gambles with greater expected utility ([32], [42]). The most prominent instances of such representation theorems are due to von Neumann and Morgenstern ([38]), Anscombe and Aumann ([1]), and Savage ([35]).1
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1606386.461399
Journalists are often the adult public’s central source of scientific information, which means that their reporting shapes the relationship the public has with science. Yet philosophers of science largely ignore journalistic communication in their inquiries about trust in science. This paper aims to help fill this gap in research by comparing journalistic norm conflicts that arose when reporting on COVID-19 and tobacco, among other policy-relevant scientific topics. I argue that the public’s image of scientists – as depositories of indisputable, value-free facts, trustworthy only when in consensus – makes it particularly difficult for journalists to ethically communicate policy-relevant science rife with disagreement. In doing so, I show how journalists, like scientists, face the problem of inductive risk in such cases. To overcome this problem, I sketch a model of trust in science that is grounded in an alternative image of scientists – what I call the responsiveness model of trust in science. By highlighting the process of science over its product, the responsiveness model requires scientists to respond to empirical evidence and the public’s values to warrant the public’s trust. I then show why this model requires journalists to be the public’s watchdogs by verifying and communicating whether scientists are being properly responsive both epistemically and non-epistemically.
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1618514.461408
Since French President Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the Assemblée nationale (the French lower parliamentary chamber) in the wake of the large victory of the far-right in the European elections, a large majority of the French people have been living in anguish. …
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1704461.461416
Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated ‘might’ claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategic trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general validity of contraposition. We criticize various approaches to incorporating veridicality into domain semantics, a paradigmatic ‘information-sensitive’ framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: stable acceptance semantics, extending a vanilla bilateral state-based semantics for epistemic modals with a knowledge operator loosely inspired by the defeasibility theory of knowledge.
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1790911.461423
A curious feature of human nature is that we’re very psychologically invested in seeing ourselves as good. Teaching applied ethics, it’s striking how resistant students often are to any hint of moral self-critique. …
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1892795.461429
Parts 3-4 of this series developed and defended a reason-responsive consequentialist theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. The next order of business is to apply this theory to shed light on bounded rationality, the Standard Picture, and the epistemology of inquiry. …
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1986579.461437
Yesterday’s post developed a reason-responsive consequentialist theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. Today’s post gives three arguments for that view. 2. The argument from minimal criteria
A good theory of bounded rationality should satisfy at least three minimal criteria. …
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2098309.461444
Framing effects concern the having of different attitudes towards logically or necessarily equivalent contents. Framing is of crucial importance for cognitive science, behavioral economics, decision theory, and the social sciences at large. We model a typical kind of framing, grounded in (i) the structural distinction between beliefs activated in working memory and beliefs left inactive in long term memory, and (ii) the topic- or subject matter-sensitivity of belief: a feature of propositional attitudes which is attracting growing research attention. We introduce a class of models featuring (i) and (ii) to represent, and reason about, agents whose belief states can be subject to framing effects. We axiomatize a logic which we prove to be sound and complete with respect to the class.
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2148283.461451
The idea that diverse groups of ordinary citizens will “outperform” expert panels has become something of a totemic conviction in democratic theory. The “diversity trumps ability” (DTA) theorem, first formulated by the economists Lu Hong and Scott E. Page (2004), asserts that under certain conditions, diverse assemblies will find better solutions to complex problems than homogeneous groups of the best experts. This result has been taken up with much enthusiasm by political theorists, some of whom have taken it to prove the epistemic supremacy of democratic decision-making over its competitors (Landemore 2013). In debates with defenders of expertocratic and epistocratic, let alone autocratic, modes of decision-making,
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2159837.461458
What does it mean to theorize about bounded rationality? Today’s post situates theories of bounded rationality against a competing Standard Picture that came to prominence during the middle of the twentieth century. …