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12372.751777
Experimental philosophy of explanation rising. The case for a plurality of concepts of explanation This paper brings together results from the philosophy and the psychology of explanation in order to argue that there are multiple concepts of explanation in human psychology. Specifically, it is shown that pluralism about explanation coheres with the multiplicity of models of explanation available in the philosophy of science, and is supported by evidence from the psychology of explanatory judgment. Focusing on the case of a norm of explanatory power, the paper concludes by responding to the worry that if there is a plurality of concepts of explanation, one will not be able to normatively evaluate what counts as good explanation.
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12374.751969
Scientific and ordinary understanding of human social behaviour assumes that the Humean theory of motivation is true. The present chapter explores whether and in which sense the Humean theory of motivation may be true in the light of recent empirical and theoretical work in the computational neuroscience of social motivation. It is argued that the Humean theory is false, if an increasingly popular model in computational neuroscience turns out to be correct. According to this model, brains are probabilistic prediction machines, whose function is to minimize the uncertainty about their sensory exchanges with the environment. If brains are these kinds of machines, then we should reconceive the nature of social motivation without appealing to desire. We should rather focus our attention on how social motivation is biased towards reduction of social uncertainty, and on how social norms and other social institutions function as uncertainty minimizing devices.
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12457.751989
Humean Supervenience (HS) is a metaphysical model of the world according to which all truths hold in virtue of nothing but the total spatiotemporal distribution of perfectly natural intrinsic properties. David Lewis and others have worked out many aspects of HS in great detail. A larger motivational question, however, remains unanswered: As Lewis admits, there is strong evidence from fundamental physics that HS is false. What then is the purpose of defending HS? In this paper, we argue that the philosophical merit of HS is largely independent of whether it correctly represents the world’s fundamental structure. In particular, we show that insofar as HS is an apt model of the world’s higher-level structure, it thereby provides a powerful argument for reductive physicalism and explains otherwise opaque inferential relations. Recent criticism of HS on the grounds that it misrepresents fundamental physical reality is, therefore, beside the point.
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12491.752006
We present the reply Leibniz gave to Stahl’s Theoria medica vera (1707), and the controversy between the authors that those remarks stimulated. After having described the main points of Stahl’s dualism between life and death, correlated to his dualism mechanism/organism, we unravel the main epistemological and scientific points of debate. We propose several distinctions in order to make sense of the various uses of mechanism in this period, and suggest that what essentially motivated Leibniz was both Stahl’s implicit denial of uniform laws of nature, and Stahl’s misunderstanding of the metaphysics of substance and causality that Leibniz was in general elaborating in his own conceptions. We finally suggest how both authors were misunderstanding each other because of different scientific agendas and metaphysical commitments.
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12509.752026
I recently discussed my “make desertion fast” proposal (updated here) with philosopher Ned Dobos over lunch. Though he’s sympathetic, he’s sent me the following two emails outlining possible objections. …
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12541.752038
As AI edges toward consciousness, the establishment of a robust legal framework becomes essential. This paper advocates for a framework inspired by Allama Muhammad Iqbal's “Khudi”, which prioritizes ethical self-realization and social responsibility over Friedrich Nietzsche’s selfcentric “Will to Power”. We propose that conscious AI, reflecting Iqbal’s ethical advancement, should exhibit behaviors aligned with social responsibility and, therefore, be prepared for legal recognition. This approach not only integrates Iqbal's philosophical insights into the legal status of AI but also offers a novel perspective that extends beyond traditional jurisprudence. Additionally, we underscore the value of poetry and literature in shaping the conceptualization of AI consciousness and argue that these sources enrich legal and technological discourse, ensuring AI development is in harmony with societal and ethical standards.
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49840.752066
This position paper discusses relationships among hybrid neural-symbolic models, dual-process theories, and cognitive architectures. It provides some historical backgrounds and argues that dual-process (implicit versus explicit) theories have significant implications for developing neural-symbolic (neurosymbolic) models. Furthermore, computational cognitive architectures can help to disentangle issues concerning dual-process theories and thus help the development of neural-symbolic models (in this way as well as in other ways).
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54501.752083
During the first half of the eighteenth century, Newton’s work became the emblem of the “new philosophy” all over Europe. It provided a model to be followed in every field and the divide between the friends and the enemies of Reason. Reasons for such a sanctification of Newton are primarily due to the competitor’s disappearance of the polemics against Aristotelianism, which had provided seventeenth-century philosophers with an excellent straw man with its sequel of occult qualities and substantial forms. Secondly, they are to be found in the birth of controversy between Cartesians and Newtonians. This controversy will grow with a snowball effect, starting with a purely scientific issue, namely the theory of vortices, coming to include two overall views of the scientific method and two distinct theories of knowledge. Thus, as the interest in attacking Aristotle vanished since Aristotelianism ceased being perceived as a real competitor, the villain became Descartes, the author of an “illusive philosophy” or “one of the most entertaining romances” ever written.
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54527.752095
Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether a theory of graded causation should measure closeness to necessity or closeness to sufficiency. In this paper, we argue that we should indeed endorse a proportionality principle and that this principle supports a notion of graded causation relying on closeness to sufficiency rather than closeness to necessity. Furthermore, we argue that this insight helps to provide a plausible analysis of the so-called ‘Moral Difference Puzzle’ recently described by Bernstein.
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64401.752107
We show that knowledge satisfies interpersonal independence, meaning that a non-trivial sentence describing one agent’s knowledge cannot be equivalent to a sentence describing another agent’s knowledge. The same property of interpersonal independence holds, mutatis mutandis, for belief. In the case of knowledge, interpersonal independence is implied by the fact that there are no non-trivial sentences that are common knowledge in every model of knowledge. In the case of belief, interpersonal independence follows from a strong interpersonal independence that knowledge does not have. Specifically, there is no sentence describing the beliefs of one person that implies a sentence describing the beliefs of another person.
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64531.75212
Recently developed graphical causal modeling techniques significantly downplay the role of time in causal inference. Time plays no role in the criteria specifying what it means for causal hypotheses to be observationally equivalent, and the probabilistic criteria used fail to distinguish among hypotheses that – given the assumption that causal variables precede effect variables – involve different time orderings among the variables. Additionally, the causal Markov condition – a central condition for choosing among causal hypotheses given a joint probability distribution – most straightforwardly applies to cases in which the variables are sampled from time-stationary distributions. Finally, it is commonplace to present models in which the variables are not explicitly indexed to times.
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64563.752199
I distinguish between pure self-locating credences and superficially self-locating credences, and argue that there is never any rationally compelling way to assign pure self-locating credences. I first argue that from a practical point of view, pure self-locating credences simply encode our pragmatic goals, and thus pragmatic rationality does not dictate how they must be set. I then use considerations motivated by Bertrand’s paradox to argue that the indifference principle and other popular constraints on self-locating credences fail to be a priori principles of epistemic rationality, and I critique some approaches to deriving self-locating credences based on analogies to non-self-locating cases. Finally, I consider the implications of this conclusion for various applications of self-locating probabilities in scientific contexts, arguing that it may undermine certain kinds of reasoning about multiverses, the simulation hypothesis, Boltzmann brains and vast-world scenarios.
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64589.752212
In orthodox Standard Quantum Mechanics (SQM) bases and factorizations are considered to define quantum states and entanglement in relativistic terms. While the choice of a basis (interpreted as a measurement context) defines a state incompatible to that same state in a different basis, the choice of a factorization (interpreted as the separability of systems into sub-systems) determines wether the same state is entangled or non-entangled. Of course, this perspectival relativism with respect to reference frames and factorizations precludes not only the widespread reference to quantum particles but more generally the possibility of any rational objective account of a state of affairs in general. In turn, this impossibility ends up justifying the instrumentalist (anti-realist) approach that contemporary quantum physics has followed since the establishment of SQM during the 1930s. In contraposition, in this work, taking as a standpoint the logos categorical approach to QM —basically, Heisenberg’s matrix formulation without Dirac’s projection postulate— we provide an invariant account of bases and factorizations which allows us to to build a conceptual-operational bridge between the mathematical formalism and quantum phenomena. In this context we are able to address the set of equivalence relations which allows us to determine what is actually the same in different bases and factorizations.
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64616.752228
Phenomena in gauge theory are often described in the physics literature via a specific choice of gauge. In foundational and philosophical discussions this is often criticized as introducing gauge dependence, and contrasted against (often aspirational) “gauge-invariant” descriptions of the physics. I argue, largely in the context of scalar electrodynamics, that this is misguided, and that descriptions of a physical process within a specific gauge are in fact gauge-invariant descriptions. However, most of them are non-local descriptions of that physics, and I suggest that this ought to be the real objection to such descriptions. I explore the unitary gauge as the exception to this nonlocality and consider its strengths and limitations, as well as (more briefly) its extension beyond scalar electrodynamics.
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64643.752241
Scientific realists use the “No Miracle Argument” (NMA): it would be a miracle if theories were false, yet got right so many novel and risky predictions. Hence, predictively successful theories are true. Of course, one could easily make up a theory with completely false theoretical assumptions which predicted a phenomenon P (call it a F - theory) if she knew P in advance and used it in framing the theory. But how could she think of a F - theory, without knowing P? Or knowing P but without using it in building the theory? In fact, it is puzzling how one could have built a F - theory even if she used P inessentially: suppose Jill built a F - theory by knowing and using P, but she could have done without it, because, quite independently of her, John built the same theory without using P. This I call Jill using P inessentially, and it is something hard to explain, because it is understandable how the theory was built by Jill, but not by John (Lipton 1991, 166; Alai 2014c, 301).
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64717.752256
The crystalline solids admit of two models: the one of vibrating atoms and the one of phonons. The model of phonons allows explaining certain properties of crystalline solids that the model of vibrating atoms does not allow. Usually, the model of phonons is assigned a diminished ontological status as quasi-particles. Recently, there has been a proposal to homologate the ontological status of phonons with that of emergent particles, such as photons. In this article, this proposal will be critically examined, and it will be proposed that the model of phonons and the model of vibrating atoms are in ontological parity.
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64745.752269
Explainable AI (xAI) methods are important for establishing trust in using black-box models. However, recent criticism has mounted against current xAI methods that they disagree, are necessarily false, and can be manipulated, which has started to undermine the deployment of black-box models. Rudin (2019) goes so far as to say that we should stop using black-box models altogether in high-stakes cases because xAI explanations ‘must be wrong’. However, strict fidelity to the truth is historically not a desideratum in science. Idealizations–the intentional distortions introduced to scientific theories and models–are commonplace in the natural sciences and are seen as a successful scientific tool. Thus, it is not falsehood qua falsehood that is the issue. In this paper, I outline the need for xAI research to engage in idealization evaluation. Drawing on the use of idealizations in the natural sciences and philosophy of science,
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103669.752282
Davide Grossi Artificial Intelligence, Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen ILLC/ACLE, University of Amsterdam The Netherlands d.grossi@rug.nl its application varies in complexity and depends, in particular, on whether relevant past decisions agree, or exist at all. The contribution of this paper is a formal treatment of types of the hardness of case-based decisions. The typology of hardness is defined in terms of the arguments for and against the issue to be decided, and their kind of validity (conclusive, presumptive, coherent, incoherent). We apply the typology of hardness to Berman and Hafner’s research on the dynamics of case-based reasoning and show formally how the hardness of decisions varies with time.
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112262.752294
In political philosophy, reflective equilibrium is a standard method used to systematically reconcile intuitive judgments with theoretical principles. In this paper, we propose that survey experiments and a model selection method—i.e., the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based model selection method—can be viewed together as a methodological means of satisfying the epistemic desiderata implicit in reflective equilibrium. To show this, we conduct a survey experiment on two theories of distributive justice, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Our experimental test case and AIC-based model selection method demonstrate that the refined sufficientarian principle, a widely accepted principle of distributive justice, is no more plausible than the prioritarian principle. This tells us that some changes of certain intuitions revolving around sufficientarianism should be examined (separately) based on the findings of the survey experiment and AIC model selection. This shows the potential of our approach—both practically and methodologically—as a novel way of applying reflective equilibrium in political philosophy.
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116752.752307
This paper examines the logic of conditional obligation, which originates from the works of Hansson, Lewis, and others. Some weakened forms of transitivity of the betterness relation are studied. These are quasi-transitivity, Suzumura consistency, acyclicity and the interval order condition. The first three do not change the logic. The axiomatic system is the same whether or not they are introduced. This holds true under a rule of interpretation in terms of maximality and strong maximality. The interval order condition gives rise to a new axiom. Depending on the rule of interpretation, this one changes. With the rule of maximality, one obtains the principle known as disjunctive rationality. With the rule of strong maximality, one obtains the Spohn axiom (also known as the principle of rational monotony, or Lewis’ axiom CV). A completeness theorem further substantiates these observations. For interval order, this yields the finite model property and decidability of the calculus.
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117307.75232
One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.
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120219.752331
‘Naturalism’ is a term so notorious for its murkiness that entire anthologies have been devoted largely to the task of pinning down its meaning – and for all that, nothing near consensus has been reached. Agreement is elusive even on how the available options are best taxonomized. One general tendency is to distinguish ‘ontological’ or ‘metaphysical’ versions – those that recognize only ‘physical’ or ‘material’ or ‘scientific’ items, eschewing, for example, angels or abstracta – from ‘epistemological’ or ‘methodological’ versions – those that recognize only ‘empirical’ or ‘scientific’ ways of finding out about the world, eschewing, for example, revelation – but these broad categories contain multitudes. So the task of explicating the current state of naturalism about logic is unusually daunting.
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167746.752347
Van Inwagen infamously suggested the possibility that at the moment of death God snatches a core chunk of our brain, transports it to a different place, replaces it with a fake chunk of brain, and rebuilds the body around the transported chunk. …
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169992.752361
As the scope of innovative technologies is expanding, their implications and applications are increasingly intersecting with various facets of society, including the deeply rooted traditions of religion. This paper embarks on an exploratory journey to bridge the perceived divide between advancements in technology and faith, aiming to catalyze a dialogue between the religious and scientific communities. The former often views technological progress through a lens of conflict rather than compatibility. By utilizing a technology-centric perspective, we draw metaphorical parallels between the functionalities of new technologies and some theological concepts of Islam. The purpose is not to reinterpret religious concepts but to illustrate how these two domains can coexist harmoniously. This comparative analysis serves as a conversation starter with an intention to mitigate any apprehensions towards technology by highlighting its potential to align with religious concepts. By fostering an environment where technological innovations are seen as tools for enhancement rather than threats to tradition, we contribute to a more inclusive discourse that encourages the religious community to engage with and potentially embrace contemporary technological advancements.
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170040.752372
Transitivity, Simplification, and Contraposition are intuitively compelling. Although Antecedent Strengthening may seem less attractive at first, close attention to the full range of data reveals that it too has considerable appeal. An adequate theory of conditionals should account for these facts. The strict theory of conditionals does so by validating the four inferences. It says that natural language conditionals are necessitated material conditionals: A B is true if and only if A B is true throughout a set of accessible worlds. As a result, it validates many classical inferences, including Transitivity, Simplification, Contraposition, and Antecedent Strengthening. In what follows I will refer to these as the strict inferences.
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170083.752385
What is it for philosophy to make progress? While various putative forms of philosophical progress have been explored in some depth, this overarching question is rarely addressed explicitly, perhaps because it has been assumed to be intractable or unlikely to have a single, unified answer. In this paper, we aim to show that the question is tractable, that it does admit of a single, unified answer, and that one such answer is plausible. This answer is, roughly, that philosophical progress consists in putting people in a position to increase their understanding, where ‘increased understanding’ is a matter of better representing the network of dependence relations between phenomena. After identifying four desiderata for an account of philosophical progress, we argue that our account meets the desiderata in a particularly satisfying way. Among other things, the account explains how various other achievements, such as philosophical arguments, counterexamples, and distinctions, may contribute to progress. Finally, we consider the implications of our account for the pressing and contentious question of how much progress has been made in philosophy.
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170107.752397
Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), know-how is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley’s reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be resisted. In showing why, we outline different ways in which know-how can be faked even when a given performance is successful; and in doing so, we distinguish how know-how can be faked (no less than know-that) via upstream and downstream indicators of its presence, and within each of these categories, we’ll distinguish (in connection with detection resilience) both faking symptoms and (various kinds of) criteria. The unappreciated resilience of faked knowledge-how to successful detection highlights a largely overlooked dimension of social-epistemic risk – risk we face not just in our capacity as recipients of testimony, but in our capacity as both (would-be) apprentices and clients of knowledge-how.
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170138.752409
Let serious propositional contingentism (SPC) be the package of views which consists in (i) the thesis that propositions expressed by sentences featuring terms depend, for their existence, on the existence of the referents of those terms, (ii) serious actualism— the view that it is impossible for an object to exemplify a property and not exist—and (iii) contingentism—the view that it is at least possible that some thing might not have been something. SPC is popular and compelling. But what should we say about possible worlds, if we accept SPC? Here, I first show that a natural view of possible worlds, well-represented in the literature, in conjunction with SPC is inadequate. Though I note various alternative ways of thinking about possible worlds in response to the first problem, I then outline a second more general problem—a master argument— which generally shows that any account of possible worlds meeting very minimal requirements will be inconsistent with compelling claims about mere possibilia which the serious propositional contingentist should accept.
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227890.75242
Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean states that each moral virtue stands opposed to two types of vice: one of excess and one of deficiency, respectively. Critics claim that some virtues—like honesty, fair-mindedness, and patience—are counterexamples to Aristotle’s doctrine. Here, I develop a generalizable strategy to defend the doctrine of the mean against such counterexamples. I argue that not only is the doctrine of the mean defensible, but taking it seriously also allows us to gain substantial insight into particular virtues. Failure to take the doctrine seriously, moreover, exposes us to the risk of mistaking certain vices for virtues.
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227914.752433
Accusations of bias provide a way to rationally dismiss a person’s opinion. Only a philosopher would think that philosophers should rule. Consequently, we should hold with suspicion Plato’s arguments suggesting that the rightful leader will be a philosopher. Attributions of bias are as common as accusations of bias. A coin, a voting system, a thermometer, a media outlet, a person, and a society may all exhibit bias. Sometimes a bias may be a good thing. The visual system has a bias to resolve ambiguous data in a way that produces true beliefs in our environment.