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92783.352633
In this paper I develop a view of token causation that is inspired by Anscombe’s Causality and Determination, and is likely what she meant by “causality consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes”. On this view, token causation is not a logical relation, even in a very broad sense, and so is very different from logical consequence, conditional probability, and counterfactual dependence. Instead, causation is a kind of ontological dependence, so that to cause something means to confer existence on it. Causation is thus absent from physics, but I argue that recognising this absence enables us to make sense of the direction of time and the stability of physical probabilities.
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130491.352727
The debate about laws of nature mainly focuses on the laws’ connection to regularities and modal facts. The much-discussed inference problem concerns why ‘it is a law that p’ entails ‘p’. Another problem (the ‘modality problem’) is about the need to explain the laws’ relation to counterfactuals, causation, and dispositions. In this paper, we argue that a third problem, the ‘normativity problem’, should play an equally important role in the debate: A theory of laws needs to explain the laws’ distinctive significance for what agents ought to do and believe. We argue that, just like the other two problems, the normativity problem poses distinct challenges for Humeans and non-Humeans and that it should be taken into account when comparing different views of laws.
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137005.352753
I was going to post the following as Deep Thoughts XLIII, in a series of posts meant to be largely tautologous or at least trivial statements:
- Everyone older than you was once your age. And then I realized that this is not actually a tautology. …
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150615.352768
In this paper, I challenge the Consequence Argument for Incompatibilism by arguing that the inference principle it relies upon is not well motivated. The sorts of non-question-begging instances that might be offered in support of it fall short.
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150637.352793
It is commonplace to note that libertarians about free will face a compatibility problem of their own. Indeterminism appears to be at odds with freedom rather than a condition for it, since it injects only chance or luck into the etiology of action. This problem, the luck problem, is widely regarded as unique to libertarians. However, this is false. Compatibilists face the same luck problem that animates libertarians. In this paper, I set out what the luck problem is and why compatibilists face it too. I then show that the most natural resources one might think a compatibilist should use to solve the problem are insufficient. I close with a proposal for compatibilists.
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152946.352809
Bryan here. Last month, I blogged on “The Strange Economics of HOT Lanes.” Today, my co-author Zixuan Ma argues that two little-known regulations explain why “overpricing” is plausibly profit-maximizing after all. …
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157170.352826
Achilles and the tortoise compete in a race where the beginning (the start) is at point O and end (the finish) is at point P. At all times the tortoise can run at a speed that is a fraction of Achilles' speed at most (with being a positive real number lower than 1, 0 < < 1), and both start the race at t = 0 at O. If the trajectory joining O with P is a straight line, Achilles will obviously win every time. It is easy to prove that there is a trajectory joining O and P along which the tortoise has a strategy to win every time, reaching the finish before Achilles.
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157192.352863
In recent years, there has been heightened interest in (at least) two threads regarding geometrical aspects of spacetime theories. On the one hand, physicists have explored a richer space of relativistic spacetime structures than that of general relativity, in which the conditions both of torsion-freeness and of metric compatibility are relaxed—this has led to the study of so-called ‘metricaffine theories’ of gravitation, on which see e.g. Hehl et al. (1995) for a masterly review. On the other hand, physicists have been increasingly interested in securing a rigorous and fully general understanding of the non-relativistic limit of general relativity—this has to novel version of Newtonian physics, potentially with spacetime torsion (‘Type II’ Newton–Cartan theory—see Hansen et al. (2022) for a systematic overview).
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210362.352884
▼ AbStrACt Since the early days of its professionalization, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the history of science has been seen as a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities. However, only one aspect of this triadic nexus, the relations between the history of science and the natural sciences, has been extensively discussed. The other aspect, the relations between the history of science and the humanities, has been less commented upon. With this paper I hope to make a small step towards redressing this imbalance, by discussing the relationships between the history of science and two other humanistic disciplines that have been historically and institutionally associated with it: the philosophy of science and general history. I argue that both of these relationships are marked by the characteristics of an unrequited friendship: on the one hand, historians of science have ignored, for the most part, calls for collaboration from their philosopher colleagues; and, on the other hand, historians specializing in other branches of history have been rather indifferent, again for the most part, to the efforts of historians of science to understand science as a historical phenomenon.
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232201.352895
I argue that rationality does not always require proportioning one’s beliefs to one’s evidence. I consider cases in which an agent’s evidence deteriorates over time, revealing less about the world or the agent’s location than their earlier evidence. I claim that the agent should retain beliefs that were supported by the earlier evidence, even if they are no longer supported by the later evidence. Failing to do so would violate an attractive principle of epistemic conservatism; it would foreseeably decrease the accuracy of the agent’s beliefs; it would make the agent susceptible to simple Dutch Books; it would allow them to manipulate their evidence to increase their confidence in desirable propositions over which they have no control. I defend the background assumption that dynamic considerations are relevant to epistemic rationality.
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234816.352905
Sebens and Carroll (2018) propose that self-locating uncertainty, constrained by their Epistemic Separability Principle (ESP), derives Born rule probabilities in Everettian quantum mechanics. Their global branching model, however, leads to local amplitudes lost, undermining this derivation. This paper argues that global branching’s premature splitting of observers, such as Bob in an EPR-Bohm setup, yields local pure states devoid of amplitude coefficients essential for Born rule probabilities. Despite their innovative framework, further issues with global branching—conflicts with decoherence, relativistic violations via physical state changes, and constraints on superposition measurements—render it empirically inadequate. Defenses, such as invoking global amplitudes, fail to resolve these flaws. Additionally, observer-centric proofs of the Born rule neglect objective statistics, weakening their empirical grounding. This analysis underscores the need to reconsider branching mechanisms to secure a robust foundation for Everettian probabilities.
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250380.352915
Imagine living in a society where most people (at least in the privileged classes) regularly participate in perpetuating a moral atrocity—slavery, say, or factory farming; any practice you’re deeply appalled by will do. …
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292461.352925
I want to argue for this thesis:
- For a punishment P for a fault F to be right, P must stand in a causal-like relation to P.
What is a causal-like relation? Well, causation is a causal-like relation. …
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325214.352935
I have long believed in what philosophers call “libertarian free will.” This isn’t about political philosophy, but philosophy of mind. Holding all physical conditions constant, determinism holds that there is exactly one thing that I can do. …
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341210.352944
This article defends the compatibility of evolutionary theory and religious belief against the objection that God could not have intentionally brought humans into existence given that the evolutionary process by which humans came into existence crucially involves random genetic mutation. The thought behind the objection is that a process cannot be both random and intended by God to unfold as it does.
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344454.352956
When we count, we often count fractions, too. We contend that fractional counting involves partial entities, which are merely possible parts of entities of the counted kind. The size of these possible parts is measured with respect to the size of a possible member of that kind. Therefore, partialhood is mereomodal, and the logical form of fractional counting claims includes mereological predicates, modal operators, and a measurement functor. Different varieties of modality and forms of measurement are involved, depending on the kinds of entities to be counted and the context. The mereomodal account validates the idea that fractional counting is a way of counting by identity, in continuity with logic-based accounts of non-fractional counting, albeit more complex than them. Such an account also explains why some kinds of entities are not involved in partialhood and cannot be fractionally counted, while others only have marginal involvement in these phenomena. In the last part, we discuss some difficult cases and show that an integrity condition for partial entities is required in the logical form of some fractional counting claims.
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357350.352966
Even with everything happening in the Middle East right now, even with (relatedly) everything happening in my own family (my wife and son sheltering in Tel Aviv as Iranian missiles rained down), even with all the rather ill-timed travel I’ve found myself doing as these events unfolded (Ecuador and the Galapagos and now STOC’2025 in Prague) … there’s been another thing, a huge one, weighing on my soul. …
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401811.352975
How can we reconstruct what long extinct animals, such as dinosaurs, looked like, how fast they moved, and what ecological role they played in their paleoenvironment? These features are not preserved in the fossil record, so paleontologists must instead turn to scientifically informed models and analogies to try to answer these questions. In her celebrated book Models and Analogies in Science, Mary Hesse illustrates the concept of material analogy using the examples of homologies and analogies in biology. These two types of analogy have given rise to two different research programs in the project of reconstructing extinct life: the Phylogenetic Approach and the Functional Morphology Approach. In this chapter I show how each of these approaches has its own strengths and weaknesses, and argue instead for an Integrated Approach that makes use of both of Hesse’s types of analogy. I conclude by highlighting the importance of paying attention to model uncertainty, adequacy-for-purpose, and the whole organism in a paleoreconstruction.
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402047.352988
For Raz, “the fundamental point about authority [is that] it removes the decision from one person to another.” It is a good question why you should allow someone else to decide for you what you are to do. One plausible response is to observe that, under the right conditions, by allowing someone else to decide for you, you are more likely to do what you ought to do anyway than if you decide what to do for yourself. That, in a nutshell, is the diagnosis of and solution to the problem of authority that Raz offers us. I agree that Raz raises an important question, and I shall not dispute his answer. I do maintain that there is a narrower and perhaps less tractable problem with “authority” that Raz misses— a problem about obedience. My aim is to bring this concern into clearer focus.
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407811.352999
A theory of quantum gravity consists of a gravitational framework which, unlike general relativity, takes into account the quantum character of matter. In spite of impressive advances, no fully satisfactory, self-consistent and empirically viable theory with those characteristics has ever been constructed. A successful semiclassical gravity model, in which the classical Einstein tensor couples to the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor of quantum matter fields, would, at the very least, constitute a useful stepping stone towards quantum gravity. However, not only no empirically viable semiclassical theory has ever been proposed, but the self-consistency of semiclassical gravity itself has been called into question repeatedly over the years. Here, we put forward a fully self-consistent, empirically viable semiclassical gravity framework, in which the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor of a quantum field, evolving via a relativistic objective collapse dynamics, couples to a fully classical Einstein tensor. We present the general framework, a concrete example, and briefly explore possible empirical consequences of our model.
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439819.353009
The present review discusses the literature on how and when social category information and individuating information influence people’s implicit judgments of other individuals who belong to existing (i.e., known) social groups. After providing some foundational information, we discuss several key principles that emerge from this literature: (a) individuating information moderates stereotype-based biases in implicit (i.e., indirectly measured) person perception, (b) individuating information usually exerts small to no effects on attitude-based biases in implicit person perception, (c) individuating information influences explicit (i.e., directly measured) person perception more than implicit person perception, (d) social category information affects implicit person perception more than it affects explicit person perception, and (e) the ability of other variables to moderate the effects of individuating information on stereotype- and attitude-based biases in implicit person perception varies. Within the discussion of each of these key points, relevant research questions that remain unaddressed in the literature are presented. Finally, we discuss both theoretical and practical implications of the principles discussed in this review.
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453496.353021
Synthetic media generators, such as DALL-E, and synthetic media artifacts, such as deepfakes, undermine our fundamental epistemic standards and practices. Yet, the nature of their epistemic threat remains elusive. After all, fictional or distorted representations of reality are as old as photography. We argue that the novel epistemic threat of synthetic media is that, for the first time, synthetic media tools afford ordinary computer users the practicable possibility to cheaply and effortlessly create and widely share fictional worlds indistinguishable from the real world or credible representations of it. We further argue that a synthetic media artifact is epistemically malignant in a given media context for a person acquainted with the context when the person is misled to confuse the version of the world depicted in it with the real world in an epistemically or morally significant way.
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465444.353033
The view that organisms are agents—and that organismal agency is fundamental to explaining biological phenomena—has become a central topic in the philosophy of biology (Walsh 2015; Moreno & Mossio 2015; Corning et al. 2023). Unlike standard causal-mechanical approaches, however, the concept of agency carries distinct teleological and normative implications that must be naturalized to be scientifically legitimate. But what exactly does naturalism require? And what counts as an adequate naturalization? I propose two desiderata: causal-location and explanatory indispensability, and compare two naturalistic accounts of agency—the organizational or constitutive account (OA) (Moreno & Mossio 2015) and the ecological or dynamical account (EA) (Walsh 2015). I argue that while OA satisfies causal-location at the cost of explanatory adequacy, EA achieves explanatory adequacy while remaining silent on causal-location. This leads to a dilemma between causal reductionism (OA) and teleological primitivism (EA), rooted in differing criteria for what naturalism requires. I distinguish two increasingly demanding grades of scientific naturalism: scientific emergentism and scientific essentialism, and argue that the dilemma arises from OA’s commitment to the latter and EA’s to the former. I conclude by showing how the emergentist criterion can resolve the dilemma by integrating OA and EA into a two-stage strategy that satisfies both desiderata.
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465471.353043
This paper advocates for a pragmatist view on quantum theory, offering a response to David Wallace’s recent criticisms of Richard Healey’s quantum pragmatism. In particular, I challenge Wallace’s general claim that quantum pragmatists—and anti-representationalists more broadly— lack the resources to make sense of the novel ‘quantum’ language used throughout modern physics in applications of quantum theory. I then show how a novel way of viewing our current best physics and the relation between quantum and classical theories follows from the pragmatist view advanced in this paper.
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465494.353052
The pragmatist philosophy of language has undergone a significant revival in recent decades, emerging as a compelling alternative to the traditional representationalist view of language and its relation to thought and reality. Richard Rorty was instrumental in this resurgence, advancing his ‘neo-pragmatism’ as a radical, global anti-representationalism. Building on Rorty’s work, Robert Brandom and Huw Price have each developed distinct neo-pragmatist frameworks, refining and adapting his ideas in their own analytic vocabularies and presenting them in a less confrontational, more conciliatory tone. This chapter aims to advance this conciliatory tradition by offering a new vision of neo-pragmatism as an irenic—common-ground-seeking—approach to the philosophy of language, which I term irenic pragmatism.
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579722.353062
Political meritocracy is the idea that political institutions should aim to empower those people who are particularly well-suited to rule. This article surveys recent literature in democratic theory that argues on behalf of institutional arrangements that aim to realize the ideal of political meritocracy. We detail two prominent families of meritocratic proposals: nondemocratic meritocracy and weighted voting. We then describe and briefly evaluate five potentially important criticisms of political meritocracy related to the coherence of merit as an ideal, the demographic objection, rent-seeking, political inequality, and social peace. We also consider the key ways in which existing electoral democracies create spaces for institutionally meritocratic forms. Finally, we highlight the importance of exploring institutional innovations that allow democracies to effectively incorporate expertise without, at the same time, becoming vulnerable to the criticisms of political meritocracy that we discuss.
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674271.353073
I’ve always found punishment and (to a lesser extent) reward puzzling. Why is it that when someone does something wrong is there moral reason to impose a harsh treatment on them, and why is it that when someone does something right—and especially supererogatory—is there moral reason to do something nice for them? …
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730252.353083
A principle of plenitude implies the existence of a host of objects, the point being to avoid arbitrariness and worldly vagueness. But to play this role, the host of objects must exhibit an appropriate host of features.
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732967.353093
In this paper, we address a key question that has been central to discussions on rationality: is the concept of rationality normative or merely descriptive? We present the findings of a corpus-linguistic study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative.
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732989.353104
As just mentioned, the Knowledge Account is a very influential view of ignorance. Recently, however, it has come under attack. Pritchard (2021a, 2021b) has offered several counterexamples that suggest ignorance has a normative dimension, which the Knowledge Account cannot easily capture (see also Meylan , 2024). Let us point out that we present these counterexamples because one of our objectives in this article is to consolidate the (possibly refutable) intuitions underlying them, using empirical data. So, here are Pritchard’s three counterexamples: First, in Pritchard’s view, it is quite unfitting to attribute ignorance of a fact to individuals when this fact cannot possibly be known. For instance, it does not sound fully appropriate to claim that “prehistorians are ignorant of whether Homo sapiens sapiens were tying their hair up.” We would rather say that they simply do not know this, or that they simply have no belief about this.