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922613.336673
The advanced division of cognitive labor generates a set of challenges and opportunities for professional philosophers. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy in light of these challenges and opportunities. For my definition of synthetic philosophy see part 2. In part 1, I’ll remind you of the centrality of the division of labor to Plato’s Republic, and why this is especially salient in his banishment of the poets from his Kallipolis. I’ll then focus on the significance of an easily overlooked albeit rather significant character, Damon, mentioned in that dialogue. I’ll argue that if we take the relationship between Socrates and Damon seriously, we’ll notice that in modeling imperfect polities, Plato inscribes Socrates within the advanced division of cognitive labor who defers to Damon as an expert on a key feature of the art of government. In fact, I’ll argue that in Republic, Plato offers us at least two ways to conceptualize philosophy’s relationship to the sciences, and that he alerts us to the social significance of this.
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922630.336941
Illusionists and a posteriori physicalists agree entirely on the metaphysical nature of reality—that all concrete entities are composed of fundamental physical entities. Despite this basic agreement on metaphysics, illusionists hold that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, whereas a posteriori physicalists hold that it does. One explanation of this disagreement would be that either the illusionists have too demanding a view about what consciousness requires, or the a posteriori physicalists have too tolerant a view. However, we will argue that this divergence of opinion is merely an upshot of the semantic indeterminacy of the term ‘conscious’ and its cognates. We shall back up this diagnosis by showing how semantic indeterminacy of the kind in question is a pervasive feature of language. By illustrating this pattern with a range of historical examples, we shall show how the dispute between the illusionists and their a posteriori physicalist opponents is one instance of a common kind of terminological imprecision. The disagreement between the illusionists and the a posteriori physicalists is thus not substantial. In effect, the two sides differ only about how to make an indeterminate term precise. The moral is that they should stop looking for arguments designed to settle the dispute in their favour.
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954150.336966
I am in my boat in a bay which forks into stream A and stream B. I just received a distress signal from two different boats: one carrying two complete strangers (whom I name “Larry” and ”Mary” for easy reference) and another carrying one other person, also a complete stranger (whom I name “Jeri”). If I row to stream A, I can save Larry and Mary, but Jeri will die; if I row to stream B, I can save Jeri, but Mary and Larry will die.
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955362.336978
It looks like they’ve found protonium in the decay of a heavy particle! Protonium is made of a proton and an antiproton orbiting each other. It lasts a very short time before they annihilate each other. …
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973868.33699
One does not just walk into Mordor. The same might be said of Hamlet criticism. But in my naive, Hobbit-like way, I read Nicholas Brooke’s essay on Hamlet, and only that.1
Like a shady contractor, Brooke complains that the last guy did the baseboards and appliances all wrong, but he’d be happy to tear it all out and do it right, for a few extra grand. …
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1001970.337
On explanationist accounts of genealogical debunking, roughly, a belief is debunked when its explanation is not suitably related to its content. We argue that explanationism cannot accommodate cases in which beliefs are explained by factors unrelated to their contents but are nonetheless independently justified. Justification-specific versions of explanationism face an iteration of the problem. The best account of debunking is a probabilistic account according to which subject S’s justification J for their belief that P is debunked when S learns that J is no more likely to be true on the hypothesis that P than on the hypothesis that ¬P . The probabilistic criterion is fully general, applying not only to cases where the learned undercutting defeater is a proposition about our beliefs or other mental states but to any case of undercutting defeat, providing the grounds for a debunking argument against the existence of a special, metacognitive debunking principle.
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1002008.337012
It is one thing to believe something, and it is another to grasp it. For example, everyone knows that life is short, but most of us arguably do not fully grasp this fact. Grasping this fact can have a notable effect on our cognition and behavior, prompting us to reconsider how to best spend our limited time. Similarly, most of us know but seldom grasp that children are starving all around the world and that we could, if we put in a sufficient collective effort, halt much of this suffering. Grasping these facts makes us more inclined to donate to charity—or at least makes us more inclined to feel guilty if we don't. As both of these examples illustrate, grasping seems to be something above and beyond mere belief or knowledge, and it seems to make an important difference to our cognitive and decision-making processes.
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1011863.337022
Basal cognition investigates cognition working upward from nonneuronal organisms. Because basal cognition is committed to empirically testable hypotheses, a methodological challenge arises: how can experiments avoid using zoocentric assumptions that ignore the ecological contexts that might elicit cognitively driven behavior in nonneuronal organisms? To meet this challenge, I articulate the principle of dynamic holism (PDH), a methodological principle for guiding research on nonneuronal cognition. I describe PDH’s relation to holistic research programs in human-focused cognitive science and psychology then present an argument from analogy based on holistic developmental biology. Last, I examine two experiments exemplifying the need for PDH.
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1011888.337033
A classic objection to Humeanism about scientific laws is that Humeans cannot make sense of the counterfactual invariance of the laws. For example, if there were ‘nothing in the entire history of the universe except a single electron’ (Lange, 2009, p. 55) then, intuitively, the laws would still be the same. But classic Humean views don’t seem to get such results.
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1023789.337044
It is tempting to think that legitimate and illegitimate authorities are both types of a single thing. One might not want to call that single thing “authority”. After all, one doesn’t want to say that real and fake money are both types of money. …
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1069613.337056
Almost everyone believes that freedom from deprivation should have significant weight in specifying what justice between generations requires. Some theorists hold that it should always trump other distributive concerns. Other theorists hold that it should have some but not lexical priority. I argue instead that freedom from deprivation should have lexical priority in some cases, yet weighted priority in others. More specifically, I defend semi-strong sufficientarianism. This view posits a deprivation threshold at which people are free from deprivation, and an affluence threshold at which people can live an affluent life, even though their lives may be even further improved beyond that point. I argue that freedom from deprivation in one generation lexically outweighs providing affluence in another generation; in all other cases, freedom from deprivation does not have lexical priority.
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1180194.337067
Here you are, just trying to eat your BLT in peace, and someone at your table starts going on about being a vegan. Your eyes roll as your blood pressure rises. You wish they would just shut up. It’s not that you don’t care about animal suffering. In other contexts, you actually care quite a bit – you would definitely do something if you thought a neighbor was mistreating their dog. You’re a good person—an animal lover even! But it’s hard to care that much about the ethics of meat-eating when these vegan types are just so preachy and annoying. This is, we suspect, a very common experience. When we’re told that something we see as ordinary— like eating meat—is actually wrong, our first reaction is to get irritated and dismissive. If it’s not about bacon, it’s about plastic straws. Or a phrase we’ve been using for years but that’s now considered offensive. Or having to share your pronouns.
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1185042.337078
The paper argues against a commitment to metaphysical necessity, semantic modalities are enough. The best approaches to elucidate the semantic modalities are (still) versions of lingustic ersatzism and fictionalism, even if only developed in parts. Within these necessary properties and the difference between natural and semantic laws can be accounted for. The proper background theory for this is an updated version of Logical Empiricism, which is congenial to recent trends in Structural Realism. The anti-metaphysical attitude of Logical Empiricism deserves revitalization. Another target besides metaphysical necessity are substantial forms of iterated modalities, as used, for instance, in the philosophy of religion.
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1185071.337088
According to the cognitive model of psychopathology, maladaptive beliefs about oneself, others, and the world are the main factors contributing to the development and persistence of various forms of mental suffering. Therefore, the key therapeutic process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—a therapeutic approach rooted in the cognitive model—is cognitive restructuring, i.e., a process of revision of such maladaptive beliefs. In this paper, I examine the philosophical assumptions underlying CBT and offer theoretical reasons to think that the effectiveness of belief revision in psychotherapy is very limited. This is the case, I argue, because the cognitive model wrongly assumes that our body of beliefs is unified, while it is in fact fragmented.
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1196838.337099
Suppose that you very quickly crush the head of a very long stretched-out serpent. Specifically, suppose your crushing takes less time than it takes for light to travel to the snake’s tail. Let t be a time just after the crushing of the head. …
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1229659.337111
Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution.
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1242778.337122
I distinguish five types of discrimination, three of which are personal-level and distinctively visual. I explain their implication relations. Then I argue that the plausibility of the claim that seeing something requires discriminating it, as opposed to simply attributing some properties to it, hinges on the type of discrimination under consideration. A weak form of discrimination trivializes the debate. Stronger notions of discrimination, however, cannot be understood without attribution. Attribution appears to form the fundamental level of personal-level representation.
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1242854.33714
What is it to say, “they are my child?” The semantics of possessives such as ‘my’ are intriguing for a number of reasons, but here I wish to pick up on a particular ambiguity present in many uses of possessives. That is, an ambiguity between the sense of a possessive that merely indicates that the subject of an utterance stands in some relationship to the object of the utterance, and the sense of a possessive that indicates that the subject of the utterance owns the object of the utterance: that the object is the property of the subject. Call the former sense of such possessives the relational sense, and the latter the propertarian sense. This ambiguity is noted by Peters and Westerståhl, who write that in fact many possessive utterances actually have very little to do with ‘real’ possession or ownership (Peters and Westerståhl 2013 715). To give a couple of examples, take the following possessive utterances, which on their most natural reading are relational possessives:
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1242880.337151
Conciliationism is the family of views that rationality requires agents to reduce confidence or suspend belief in p when acknowledged epistemic peers (i.e. agents who are (approximately) equally well-informed and intellectually capable) disagree about p. While Conciliationism is prima facie plausible, some have argued that Conciliationism is not an adequate theory of peer disagreement because it is self-undermining. Responses to this challenge can be put into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: the Solution Responses which deny Conciliationism is self-undermining and attempt to provide arguments which demonstrate this; and the Skeptical Responses which accept that Conciliationism is self-undermining but attempt to mitigate this result by arguing this is either impermanent and/or not very worrisome. I argue that, by Conciliationism’s own lights, both kinds of responses (almost certainly) fail to save Conciliationism from being self-undermining. Thus, Conciliationism is (almost certainly) permanently self-undermining. This result is significant because it demonstrates that Conciliationism is likely hopeless: there is likely nothing that can save Conciliationism from this challenge. I further argue that Conciliationism, like any view, should be abandoned if it is (almost certainly) hopeless.
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1242911.337162
In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection.
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1300695.337172
Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking – thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other ‘critical thinkers’ to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs.
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1309427.337183
I propose a novel (interpretation of) quantum theory, which I will call Environmental Determinacy-based or EnD Quantum Theory (EnDQT). In contrast to the well-known quantum theories, EnDQT has the benefit of not adding hidden variables, and it is not in tension with relativistic causality by providing a local causal explanation of quantum correlations without measurement outcomes varying according to, for example, systems or worlds. It is conservative, and so unlike theories such as spontaneous collapse theories, no modifications of the fundamental equations of quantum theory are required to establish when determinate values arise, and in principle, arbitrary systems can be in a superposition for an arbitrary amount of time. According to EnDQT, at some point, some systems acquired the capacity to have and give rise to other systems having determinate values, and where this capacity propagates via local interactions between systems. When systems are isolated from the systems that belong to these chains of interactions, they can, in principle, evolve unitarily indefinitely. EnDQT provides novel empirical posits that may distinguish it from other quantum theories. Furthermore, via the features of the systems that start the chains of interactions, it may provide payoffs to other areas of physics and their foundations, such as cosmology.
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1309453.337194
Reconstructions of quantum theory are a novel research program in theoretical physics which aims to uncover the unique physical features of quantum theory via axiomatization. I focus on Hardy’s “Quantum Theory from Five Reasonable Axioms” (2001), arguing that reconstructions represent a modern usage of axiomatization with significant points of continuity to von Neumann’s axiomatizations in quantum mechanics. In particular, I show that Hardy and von Neumann share similar methodological ordering, have a common operational framing, and insist on the empirical basis of axioms. In the reconstruction programme, interesting points of discontinuity with historical axiomatizations include the stipulation of a generalized space of theories represented by a framework and the stipulation of analytic machinery at two levels of generality (first by establishing a generalized mathematical framework and then by positing specific formulations of axioms). In light of the reconstruction programme, I show that we should understand axiomatization attempts as being context–dependent, context which is contingent upon the goals of inquiry and the maturity of both mathematical formalism and theoretical underpinnings within the area of inquiry. Drawing on Mitsch (2022)’s account of axiomatization, I conclude that reconstructions should best be understood as provisional, practical, representations of quantum theory that are well suited for theory development and exploration. However, I propose my context–dependent re–framing of axiomatization as a means of enriching Mitsch’s account.
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1358416.337205
Optimality Justifications is the triumphant culmination of a research programme pursued by Gerhard Schurz for a little over fifteen years. At its heart is a mathematical result that Schurz proves, building on a tradition of related results from the computational theory of learning. I’ll describe this result below. Upon this result, Schurz wishes to build a novel a posteriori justification of inductive inference as a rational method by which to form empirical beliefs. And around this justification, he wishes to construct a comprehensive internalist foundationalist epistemology. The basic beliefs of this foundationalist system are certain analytic truths and certain of those beliefs formed by introspection; and the inferences by which we are justified in forming new beliefs on the basis of ones already justified are classical logical deduction, induction, and abduction (or inference to the best explanation).
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1358442.337215
In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.
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1365854.337225
Some philosophers think that notwithstanding Special Relativity, there is a True Absolute Reference Frame. Suppose this is so. This reference frame, surely, is not our reference frame. We are on a spinning planet rotating around a sun orbiting the center of our galaxy. …
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1369900.337237
Broadcasting Versus Narrowcasting
Some weeks ago, while lazily scrolling on Substack Notes, I noticed an interesting comment made by someone (I don’t remember who) about an essay on Noah Smith’s blog. …
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1416165.337248
Pragmatic vindicatory genealogies provide both a cause and a rationale and can thus affect the space of reasons. But how far is the space of reasons affected by this kind of genealogical argument? What normative and evaluative implications do these arguments have? In this paper, I unpack this issue into three different sub-questions and explain what kinds of reasons they provide, for whom are these reasons, and for what. In relation to this final sub-question I argue, most importantly, that these arguments are ambiguous about what they give us reasons for, meaning that they can be interpreted both as justifications for recognizing the normative standing of certain norms, values, and practices - and thus for living by them - and as excuses for those that do so. I illustrate this point by reference to the genealogical vindication of honour cultures, showing how the vindicatory argument can illuminate such case as one of excusing moral ignorance. Drawing on legal theory and moral philosophy, I show that different evaluative and normative implications hang on the result of the interpretation as either justification or excuse, and show that this ambiguity is a virtue rather than a limitation.
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1416187.337259
Consider the project of using one’s time, money, and/or other resources to help others, and specifically to help them the most—or, as some like to call it, effective altruism (following the definition in MacAskill, 2019). Do we have moral reason to engage in that project? Are we, in many practical circumstances, morally required to do so?
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1459573.337269
I often talk about how philosophy needs better discovery systems, and try to find ways to clearly communicate my own work (e.g. summarizing My Big Ideas, and my main “myth-busting” updates to our disciplinary conventional wisdom)—while inviting others to do likewise. …