1. 12464.030621
    We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US. We introduce a simple framework to understand and assess the role of judges as “gatekeepers”, monitoring the admission of science in the courtroom. We show how judges face a crucial choice, namely, whether to limit Daubert assessment to the abstract reliability of the methods used by the expert witness or also to check whether the application of those methods was correct. Undesirable outcomes result from both choices, thereby giving rise to the “gatekeeper’s dilemma.” We illustrate the dilemma by analyzing in some detail two well-known cases of Daubert challenges to economic experts. Finally, we present reasons for the absence of straightforward solutions to the dilemma and for its likely endurance.
    Found 3 hours, 27 minutes ago on PhilSci Archive
  2. 50098.031959
    In his discussion of the cognitive character and epistemic value of art, philosopher Nelson Goodman suggests that artworks have the capacity to “inform what we encounter later and elsewhere” (Goodman, 1968, p. 260). Indeed, for Goodman, if art has cognitive value, it lies, at least partly, in its ability to change how we experience the world. “What a Manet or Monet or Cézanne does to our subsequent seeing of the world,” Goodman writes, “is as pertinent to their appraisal as is any direct confrontation” (ibid.).
    Found 13 hours, 54 minutes ago on Andreas Elpidorou's site
  3. 61933.032004
    Person-affecting views in population ethics state that (in cases where all else is equal) we’re permitted but not required to create people who would enjoy good lives. In this paper, I present an argument against every possible variety of person-affecting view. The argument takes the form of a dilemma. Narrow person-affecting views must embrace at least one of three implausible verdicts in a case that I call ‘Expanded Non- Identity.’ Wide person-affecting views run into trouble in a case that I call ‘Two-Shot Non-Identity.’ One plausible practical upshot of my argument is as follows: we individuals and our governments should be doing more to reduce the risk of human extinction this century.
    Found 17 hours, 12 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  4. 62004.032018
    According to a prominent view, discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off. In this paper, I argue that this harm-based account runs into trouble because it cannot point to a harm, without making controversial metaphysical commitments, in cases of discrimination in which the discriminatory act kills the discriminatee. That is, the harm-based account suffers from a problem of death. I then show that the two main alternative accounts of the wrongness of discrimination—the mental-state-based account and the objective-meaning account—do not run into this problem.
    Found 17 hours, 13 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  5. 71107.032031
    A large majority of American college students — almost three-quarters — go to public schools. For four-year colleges, it’s about two-thirds. Yet strangely, these “public” schools aren’t equally open to the entire public. …
    Found 19 hours, 45 minutes ago on Bet On It
  6. 107195.032044
    In Who’s afraid of A. C. Bradley?comes out in favor of “talk[ing] about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people.” If “character criticism” is abandoned, you’ll miss most of what is good and important in the plays. …
    Found 1 day, 5 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  7. 238006.032056
    Intolerance and polarization are on the up, or so the headlines say. If true, it’s happened before, and been far worse. Thomas Jefferson wrote, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. …
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  8. 238028.032068
    Warning: What follows contains a major spoiler of one of the recent short stories by sci-fi author Greg Egan, “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine.” If you’ve not read the story but would like to, read it before reading this post. …
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on The Archimedean Point
  9. 238030.032087
    Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. …
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on Bet On It
  10. 238065.032136
    With regards to the inefficiencies and uncompromising situations within the humanities and social sciences field in Iran, the challenge of problematizing these sciences is inevitable. So far, numerous research analyzing humanities and social sciences’ problems in the Iranian academic system have been published. Considering the important role of humanities and social sciences in the modern Iranian society, we attempt to suggest a theoretical framework for the problematization of humanities and social sciences in Iran. The exploration of the main challenges facing humanities and social sciences in Iran from the community, academy and administration point of view, sparks three hypotheses. First, humanities and social sciences’ theories and teachings are not applied accurately. Second, the humanities and social sciences’ schools of thought are not chosen properly according to Iranian circumstances. And third, there are metaphysical differences between axioms and presupposition of humanities and social sciences having western origins and those with Islamic-Iranian culture. Keywords: Humanities, Social Sciences, Problematization, Social relevance, Application of science, Adaptation of science, Science’ origins.
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on PhilPapers
  11. 238089.032148
    This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation.
    Found 2 days, 18 hours ago on Natalja Deng's site
  12. 243203.032167
    Physicist Percy Bridgman has been taken by Heather Douglas to be an exemplar defender of an untenable value-free ideal for science. This picture is complicated by a detailed study of Bridgman’s philosophical views of the relation between science and society. The normative autonomy of science, a version of the value-free ideal, is defended. This restriction on the provenance of permissible values in science is given a basis in Bridgman’s broader philosophical commitments, most importantly, his view that science is primarily an individual commitment to a set of epistemic norms and values. Considerations of external moral or social values are not, on this view, intrinsic to scientific practice, though they have a broader pragmatic significance. What Bridgman takes as the proper relation between science and society is shown through analysis of his many writings on the topic and consideration of his rarely remarked upon involvement in the most problematic example of “Big Science” of his day: the atomic bomb. A reevaluation of Bridgman’s views provides a unique characterization of what is at stake in the values in science debate: the normative autonomy of science.
    Found 2 days, 19 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  13. 304216.032183
    Aaron Ross Powell has an interesting essay about the arguments against the use of AI to create “intellectual” content such as art or pieces of writing. Powell identifies three such arguments: “The most common arguments against the use of LLM technology—the chatbots like ChatGPT that produce text from a prompt, or the image generators like Midjourney that produce visual works—take a few forms. …
    Found 3 days, 12 hours ago on The Archimedean Point
  14. 417188.032194
    (See all posts in this series here.) Philosophers have been debating implicit biases for some time. In Chapter 5 of MoM, I argue that automatic attention provides a scrutable type of implicit bias, scrutable because we understand well automatic attention across various domains and the automatic biases that engender it. …
    Found 4 days, 19 hours ago on The Brains Blog
  15. 583733.032215
    It’s no secret that I like (something close enough to) utilitarianism as a moral theory. But there’s one area where I think the utilitarian tradition really falls short, which is that it tends not to acknowledge the full range of normative concepts. …
    Found 6 days, 18 hours ago on Good Thoughts
  16. 586923.032228
    I recently stumbled upon Wikipedia’s article on the “Model minority myth.” Which instantly raises the question: “What precisely is mythical about this ‘myth’?” The article’s bias is so astounding that I shall critique it line-by-line. …
    Found 6 days, 19 hours ago on Bet On It
  17. 587846.03224
    A few years back, Musashino University made the decision to broadly teach sustainability to all students starting from the freshman level. Since I had previously done no formal research on the topic, in order to prepare properly, I spent the two months before the semester reading extensively about the meaning and practice of sustainability. This study I conducted changed my mind about the topic, in the sense that I came to think that the SDGs was perhaps the most important course I have ever taught in the university. In teaching about the SDGs, we are providing our students with information vital to their future survival, not just at the level of employment, but at the level of providing for and protecting themselves and their families in the difficult world that is to come.
    Found 6 days, 19 hours ago on Charles Muller's site
  18. 589629.032253
    The value-free ideal (VFI) for science has been an important topic of debate for hundreds of years (Proctor 1991), and it has played a particularly significant role in the recent philosophical literature on “values and science.” Heather Douglas, whose critique of the VFI has been foundational for this recent philosophical literature, defines the VFI as the view that “the value judgments internal to science, involving the evaluation and acceptance of scientific results at the heart of the research process, are to be as free as humanly possible of all social and ethical values” (2009, 45). At this point, the dominant position among philosophers of science is that the VFI should be rejected (Brown under review; Douglas and Branch 2024; Parker 2024). By adopting this conclusion, scholars have opened up a range of important questions about how to manage the influences of values in science and how to distinguish appropriate roles for values from inappropriate roles (e.g., Holman and Wilholt 2022).
    Found 6 days, 19 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  19. 670214.032264
    On a conventionalist theory of promises, there is a social institution of promising, somewhat akin to a game, and a promise is a kind of communicative action that falls under the rules of that institution. …
    Found 1 week ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  20. 683552.032279
    (See all posts in this series here.) Movements of the Mind (MoM) is about the structure of agency. It also gives a theory of attention. Indeed, it also provides a theory of psychological bias. For good measure, it argues that intention is a type of memory, linking it to working memory. …
    Found 1 week ago on The Brains Blog
  21. 758730.032291
    In Winter 2023-4, I taught a Masters seminar called “Discrimination Through the Lens of Philosophy of Science” at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich. The course covered topics related to discrimination that intersected with more general themes from philosophy of science and involved a wide range of readings from philosophy, sociology, causal inference, legal studies, and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. I was surprised by the extent to which these readings from independent disciplines and sub-disciplines engaged with a common set of questions and debates. Because there does not appear to be a textbook or course that covers the range of topics we considered, I here give a summary of the course in the hope of encouraging others to develop such courses and textbooks. Additionally, I think it would be possible to develop an introductory philosophy of science course called “Philosophy of Science Through the Lens of Discrimination” but such a course would only be feasible given a textbook or alternate readings, as the syllabus for this course was ambitious even for an MA seminar.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on PhilSci Archive
  22. 830257.032304
    This is widely agreed: liberalism, and by extension, the social and political order we call “liberal democracy,” are in crisis. The sources of this crisis are many, some essentially exogenous and others more endogenously tied to liberal thought and the way liberal democracies actually work. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on The Archimedean Point
  23. 863891.032315
    When does power dominate? This discussion explores whether a version of James Bohman’s status-centric view of domination (Bohman 2012) can provide a promising general answer to this question. Roughly, on this view, power dominates where it harmfully denies statuses that power should not deny. I shall suggest that, properly understood, the view meets various desiderata that a general view of the conditions of domination should meet. En route, I critically engage prominent arbitrary power views of (non)domination and explore the impact of domination in epistemic and discursive status in public justification. Before I say more on the aims of this discussion, I provide some needed context.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  24. 863914.032324
    How can the Biblical God be the Lord and King who, being typically unseen and even self-veiled at times, authoritatively leads people for divine purposes? This article’s main thesis is that the answer is in divine moral leading via human moral experience of God (of a kind to be clarified). The Hebrew Bible speaks of God as ‘king,’ including for a time prior to the Jewish human monarchy. Ancient Judaism, as Martin Buber has observed, acknowledged direct and indirect forms of divine rule and thus of theocracy. This article explores the importance of divine rule as divine direct leading, particularly in moral matters, without reliance on indirect theocracy supervised by humans. It thus considers a role for God as Über-King superior to any human king, maintaining a direct moral theocracy without a need for indirect theocracy. The divine goal, in this perspective, is a universal commonwealth in righteousness, while allowing for variation in political structure. The article identifies the importance in the Hebrew Bible of letting God be God as an Über-King who, although self-veiled at times, leads willing people directly and thereby rules over them uncoercively. It also clarifies a purpose for divine self-veiling neglected by Buber and many others, and it offers a morally sensitive test for unveiled authenticity in divine moral leading.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  25. 863943.032336
    How might a society wrong people by the way in which it remembers its past? In recent years, philosophers have articulated serval ways in which people may be wronged by dominant historical narratives. My focus will be on a way in which we may wrong people which has yet to feature in this discussion: the consigning of people to history. This paper investigates the wrongs involved in collective narratives that consign certain identities to a country’s past but not its present or future. I will argue that these narratives can wrong people by exiling them from the imagined community, which in turn leads to several other significant harms. I will begin by examining this phenomenon before going on to articulate the distinctive wrongs and harms involved in consigning to history. I then argue that people have a prima facie duty not to develop or employ national narratives that consign people to history and a responsibility to challenge and resist the use of such narratives. This responsibility will be especially strong for powerful and privileged people, for people with a special interest in resisting such narratives and for those able to draw on the resources of existing collectives.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  26. 867980.032345
    An essential feature of autonomous adaptive agency is that a system behaves according to an intrinsic norm. In this paper, we illustrate and clarify this notion of “behavior according to an intrinsic norm” with a minimalistic model of agency. We present a minimal metabolic system whose auto-catalytic dynamics define a viability region for different concentrations of available resource or ‘food’ molecules. We initially consider the availability of food as a control parameter for metabolic dynamics. A bifurcation diagram shows that for fixed values of available food, there exists a viability region. This region has an non-zero stable equilibrium and a lower boundary that takes the form of an unstable equilibrium—below which, the tendency of the system is towards “death”, a stable equilibrium with a zero concentration of metabolites. We define the viability region as that in which the system tends toward the “living” stable-equilibrium. Outside of this region, in the precarious region, the system may live for some time but will eventually die if the food concentration does not change. With a precise definition of system-determined death, living, precarious and viable regions we move on to reconsider the available concentration of resources ([F ]), not as a free parameter of the system but as modulated by organismic behaviour. By coupling the metabolism to a behavioural mechanism, we simulate a stochastic, up-resource gradient climbing behaviour. As a result, the effect of behaviour on the viability space can be mapped and quantified. This lets us move closer to defining adaptive action more precisely as that course of behaviour whose effect is in accordance with an intrinsic normative field.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Xabier Barandiaran's site
  27. 868125.032357
    Living agency is subject to a normative dimension (good-bad, adaptive-maladaptive) that is absent from other types of interaction. We review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centered perspective, identifying two central problems and their solution: (1) How to define the topology of the viability space so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure, and (2) how to relate both the processes that establish norms and those that result in norm-following behavior. We present a minimal metabolic system that is coupled to a gradient-climbing chemotactic mechanism. Studying the relationship between metabolic dynamics and environmental resource conditions, we identify an emergent viable region and a precarious region where the system tends to die unless environmental conditions change. We introduce the concept of normative field as the change of environmental conditions required to bring the system back to its viable region. Norm-following, or normative action, is defined as the course of behavior whose effect is positively correlated with the normative field. We close with a discussion of the limitations and extensions of our model and some final reflections on the nature of norms and teleology in agency.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Xabier Barandiaran's site
  28. 921649.032369
    In his erudite essay, Stephen Turner invites us to use Feyerabend to reflect on the “distinctive coercive power of the new technology of digital world.” I like his treatment of the way ‘disinformation’ itself has become a “novel form of coercion, based on a novel form of authority over what is treated as true.” And he is right to suggest that the very idea presupposes an ideal theory deviation from whose elements “is taken to be a source of error.” Turner and I agree that our epistemic environment is always populated by strategic actors (including ourselves) constituted, in part, by differential power relations.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  29. 921739.032378
    The growing field of social metaphysics is centrally concerned with social properties— properties like being a woman, being Black, being disabled, being money, being art, and so on, that have claim to being both socially significant and socially constructed. Social constructionism about social properties suggests, in turn, the truth of conferralism, the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. The most carefully and thoroughly worked-out version of conferralism is the one developed in Ásta’s Categories We Live By; and so, although our target is broader, that is the version we focus on here. Ásta’s view has a great deal of intuitive appeal—so much so that even many of her critics seem at least sympathetic to it, and some have adopted modified versions of it. But, as we shall argue, conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its motivation.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  30. 929639.032388
    Bet On It reader Vanja Månborg knows a lot about rent control in Sweden. If you think the Sweden is a country of thoughtful technocrats where government intervention works well, reading his guest post may make you think again. …
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Bet On It