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32767.153551
Philosophical interest in structural injustice has risen sharply since the publication of Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice (Young 2011). In short, a structural injustice occurs when social, economic, or political processes operate to produce an unjust outcome, where those processes cannot be reduced to identifiable wrongs perpetrated by isolatable agents (regardless of whether those agents are individuals or collectives, such as governments or corporations). Paradigm examples of structural injustices include widespread homelessness and exploitative labour practices—both of which are examples analysed by Young.
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48734.153703
The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientific models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientific models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct fictionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success.
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48762.153721
Despite all the encyclopedic knowledge that biological sciences have accumulated regarding living beings, their physiology and behaviour, their molecular bases, their development and evolution, it is still frustratingly elusive to find a neat and uncontroversial answer to the (apparently) simple question “What are living beings?” The traditional approach to answering this question has been by means of definitions. Many have been proposed in the literature over the years (each one emphasising different aspects of living beings, such as biochemical composition, metabolism, thermodynamics, evolution, or self-organisation), but none have achieved transversal acceptance in the community (Sagan 1970; Pályi, Zucchi and Caglioti 2002; Tsokolov 2009; Bedau and Cleland 2010; Trifonov 2011; Kolb 2018). So much is the case that some have declared, with resignation, that it is impossible to find such a definition and that we should better forget the whole question (Machery 2012).
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60384.153738
My Neyman Seminar in the Statistics Department at Berkeley was followed by a lively panel discussion including 4 Berkeley faculty, orchestrated by Ryan Giordano (Dept of Statistics):
- Xueyin Snow Zhang (Dept. …
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71176.153753
Herzog, L., Hindriks, F., & Wittek, R. (2024). How institutions decay: towards an endogenous theory. Economics and Philosophy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267124000208 Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). More information can be found on the University of Groningen website: https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/self-archiving-pure/taverne-amendment.
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145329.153767
Assertions are speech acts by means of which we express beliefs. As such they are at the heart of our linguistic and social practices. Recent research has focused extensively on the question whether the speech act of assertion is governed by norms, and if so, under what conditions it is acceptable to make an assertion. Standard theories propose, for instance, that one should only assert that p if one knows that p (the knowledge account), or that one should only assert that p if p is true (the truth account). In a series of four experiments, this question is addressed empirically. Contrary to previous findings, knowledge turns out to be a poor predictor of assertability, and the norm of assertion is not factive either. The studies here presented provide empirical evidence in favour of the view that a speaker is warranted to assert that p only if her belief that p is justified.
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164129.153779
We have lots of good arguments for a variety of epistemic norms on how you should plan to change your credences or beliefs upon coming to possess new evidence. We don’t have many good arguments for how you should actually change your credences or beliefs in response to receiving new evidence. Sure, we do have some arguments for actual epistemic norms, but none of them are the gold standard in the field, that is, none of them are accuracy-dominance arguments. Here we fill this gap. Doing so requires some conceptual development about good and bad ways to evaluate your epistemic performance. In short: your evidence, while not directly placing constraints on your rational attitudes, places a constraint on how you should evaluate your epistemic performance. If you possess evidence E, it seems, from your point of view, bad to take non-E worlds as relevant to the assessment of your epistemic performance. Using this idea, we develop an accuracy-dominance argument for Actual Conditionalization and a variety of other actual updating norms.
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205364.153791
An artwork is better if it’s unified—its parts working together for a single end. If this definition is fuzzier than you like, is greater precision possible? The philosopher Monroe Beardsley, in his massively-comprehensive opus Aesthetics, did no better: unified works, he wrote, “contain nothing that does not belong; it all fits together.” This may be informative enough, because we know unity when we see it, but still, there’s value in looking, and in analyzing what we see. …
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221791.153801
Jessica Wilson (2021) offers three characterizations of strong emergence: (1) heuristically, when higher-level features cannot in-principle be deduced from lower-level features, (2) the rejection of Physical Causal Closure in the emergence hexalemma, and (3) when a higher-level feature depends on lower-level features but has a novel power. I explicate Bernard Lonergan (1992 [1957])’s account of emergence to argue that these three characterizations come apart. Lonergan’s account is only weak emergence according to (1), and affirms Physical Causal Closure by denying adjunct premises rather than any of the assumptions of the emergence hexalemma, yet counts as strong emergence according to (3).
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221819.153813
RÉSUMÉ: La métaphysique est traditionnellement conçue comme visant la vérité — en réalité les vérités les plus fondamentales sur les caractéristiques les plus générales de la réalité. Les partisans du naturalisme philosophique, qui insistent pour que les revendications philosophiques soient fondées sur la science, ont souvent adopté une attitude éliminativiste à l'égard de la métaphysique, n’accordant par conséquent que peu d’attention à cette définition. Dans la littérature plus récente, toutefois, le naturalisme a plutôt été interprété comme signifiant que la conception traditionnelle de la métaphysique ne peut être acceptée que si l'on est réaliste scientifique (et que l'on met les bonnes contraintes sur les revendications métaphysiques acceptables).
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221846.154609
At the beginning of the 21st century, a peculiar discussion about the possible existence of unresolvable contradictions in the conceptual bases of classical electrodynamics was carried out. The arguments put forward to point out such alleged inconsistencies, as well as the replies they received, constitute an excellent example of scientific controversy from which electromagnetic theory emerged unscathed. However, the details of the debate show that classical physics, far from being devoid of interesting problems, can still accommodate various and profound lines of research of a fundamental nature.
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221874.154641
Some authors have stated that relational understandings of quantum phenomena [Kochen 1985, Bene-Dieks 2002, Berkovitz-Hemmo 2006, Conroy 2012, Mermin- Fuchs-Schack 2014, Healey 2012, Brukner 2015, Auffeves- Grangier, 2016 Zwirn, 2016] and in particular Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) [Rovelli 1996], lead to a form of solipsism [Pienar 2021], and worried that this solipsism could undermine the possibility of doing science.
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221901.154654
I argue that the brain does not have its computational structure intrinsically, but only in relation to its environment. I support this view (externalism) with a case study in the neuroscience and evolutionary biology of color vision, showing that which aspects of the brain’s causal structure rise to the level of computation — which features of its causal structure count as part of its functional structure or “wiring diagram” — depends on its environment. I show that this version of externalism helps answer some pressing methodological questions in neuroscience and explainable AI. Along the way I connect some traditional debates about externalism to contemporary cognitive science, and demonstrate the promise of a deflationary approach to cognitive scientific explanation.
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260701.154667
Another usage of the phrase, ‘taking responsibility’ applies to something that has already happened rather than something that the agent is undertaking. Someone might say, ‘I take responsibility for the damage to your car’. In that case, they could be saying that they are responsible (and always were), and now they are owning up to that fact. But the phrase does not always imply that the person accepts that the damage was their fault, or that they feel they are responsible in a basic sense. People often talk about ‘taking responsibility’ when they accept liability, that is, when they accept that it is their duty to repair or recompense for a harm to another person. Liability does not always require basic responsibility: there are other links to the agent that will justify liability. It may be that the agent’s children or pets damaged the car, and so she is not responsible in a basic sense.
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260732.15469
This article focusses on arguments concerning the blameworthiness, or culpability, of negligence. Roughly speaking, a negligent action is a harmful action that is done inadvertently. The article sets out the puzzle of negligence and contrasts it with recklessness and strict liability. Unlike recklessness, negligence does not involve an awareness of the risk taken. On the other hand, negligence seems more plausible as a genuine ground of culpability than strict liability. The article surveys the various arguments that have been given for the culpability of negligence, and suggests that we will not find grounds for blameworthiness in pure negligence. However, there may nonetheless be ways to vindicate legal and informal practices of negligence responsibility.
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278973.154707
Like many superficially accomplished people, my life strategy has been to stick with things at which I was immediately adept and abandon all others. Take philosophy. It’s not that I was great at it when I started out, or that I haven’t got better, but I showed some early promise and so I persevered. …
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310521.154718
If you cut out the yellow shape here, you can fold it up along the red lines, and all 11 sharp tips will meet at one point! You’ll get a polyhedron with 12 corners, tiled by equilateral triangles. 5 triangles meet at each corner. …
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318023.15473
The best-system theory of lawhood is understandably popular (especially in the philosophy-of-science wing of metaphysics), above all because it avoids the metaphysical excesses of more inflationary competitors. But some regard its best-known version, namely, David Lewis’s, as still being too inflationary. “Lite” versions have been developed that attempt to avoid Lewis’s reliance on a distinction between natural and non-natural properties. The concerns about naturalness are misguided. Lewis’s theory doesn’t introduce a problematic gap between the metaphysics of laws and the aims of physics. And lite best-system theories (which come in different flavors) have their own troubles. Accept no substitutes! The best best-system theory is the original, still with 100% naturalness.
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318398.15474
This chapter explores the blameworthiness of everyday compliance with oppressive norms. Any account of the appropriate response should meet two desiderata: first, it should make sense of the difference in position, and corresponding difference in appropriate response, of those in the oppressed groups and those in the oppressor groups (the asymmetry intuition), and second, it should not ignore or undermine the agency of the oppressed person (it should navigate the ‘agency dilemma’). I argue that neither traditional stinging response, such as blame or shame, nor traditional therapeutic responses such as those a clinician may take, are apt in the case of wrongdoing that is due to false consciousness. False consciousness does damage agency, but it does not undermine it completely. The chapter proposes a solidarity based response, which is primarily appropriate between those who are in the same group. This makes sense of the relevance of different social positions without denying that those in the oppressed group are also in the grip of false consciousness. It avoids the problem of being patronizing because it is limited to those who are in the same situation, and so does not have a hierarchical structure.
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318431.154756
This paper builds on one of Raz’s most interesting contributions to responsibility theory: his argument for the claim that we are responsible for some inadvertent actions. Raz argues that, as persons, we are not separable from our interactions with the world. (Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility). The world sometimes cooperates, and it sometimes does not, but in order to act at all, we need to see ourselves a certain way: as having “a domain of secure competence”, and within our domain of secure competence, we see ourselves as responsible. Raz thinks that an important aspect of our sense of self (or possibly an inescapable aspect of our sense of self) entails that we can (or possibly, must) take responsibility in some cases where we do not meet the traditional control and intention conditions. I will call this, ‘expansive responsibility’.
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360201.154773
Modern analyses of causation standardly treat cause and effect as events. Disagreement persists over what exactly events are, and whether some nearby analysis—perhaps in terms of facts or states of affairs—might be superior. There is, however, not much sympathy for the traditional understanding of causes as persisting things, whether those be substances, powers, or properties. One does still find hearty bands of enthusiasts who defend such old-school ideas. But to endorse things as causes requires setting oneself against the mainstream of research in the metaphysics of causation.
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394860.154784
Biological modalities, i.e., biologically possible, impossible, or necessary states of affairs have not received much attention from philosophers. Yet, it is widely agreed that there are biological constraints on physically possible states of affairs, such that not everything that is physically possible is also biologically possible, even if everything that is biologically possible is also physically possible. Furthermore, biologists use concepts that appear to be modal in nature, such as the concept of evolvability in evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo-devo.” The present chapter investigates what kind of modality underlies the concept of evolvability. This concept tries to capture the capacity of an organism or a lineage to sustain genetic changes that enable it to evolve or to evolve adaptively. The basic idea of the proposed approach is to construe evolvability as a kind of accessibility in a modal space. The difficult part is to specify this modal space and the relevant accessibility relation. While there may not be a general way of defining such a relation, there exist model systems for which it is possible, e.g., evolving small RNAs. The modal space in such cases turns out to be quite distinct from those constructed by philosophers, e.g., David Lewis’s similarity metric for possible worlds. Even though the biological case examined here is quite special, attending to the way in which biological possibilities are modeled in this case harbors some general lessons about biological modalities, in particular their dependence on the explanatory goals of the models modeling modality.
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394892.154797
This series of Elements in Philosophy of Science provides an extensive overview of the themes, topics and debates which constitute the philosophy of science. Distinguished specialists provide an up-to-date summary of the results of current research on their topics, as well as offering their own take on those topics and drawing original conclusions.
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404498.154809
In an argument that David Lewis’s account of possible worlds leads to inductive skepticism, I used this premise:
- If knowing that x is F (where F is purely non-indexical and x is a definite description or proper name) does not epistemically justify inferring that x is G (where G is purely non-indexical), then neither does knowing x is F and that x is I (now, here, etc. …
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435504.154821
A number of rules for resolving majority cycles in elections have been proposed in the literature. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit (J Theor Polit 33:475–524, 2021) axiomatically characterized the class of rules refined by one such cycle-resolving rule, dubbed Split Cycle: in each majority cycle, discard the majority preferences with the smallest majority margin. They showed that any rule satisfying five standard axioms plus a weakening of Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), called Coherent IIA, is refined by Split Cycle. In this paper, we go further and show that Split Cycle is the only rule satisfying the axioms of Holliday and Pacuit together with two additional axioms, which characterize the class of rules that refine Split Cycle: Coherent Defeat and Positive Involvement in Defeat. Coherent Defeat states that any majority preference not occurring in a cycle is retained, while Positive Involvement in Defeat is closely related to the well-known axiom of Positive Involvement (as in J Pérez Soc Choice Welf 18:601–616, 2001). We characterize Split Cycle not only as a collective choice rule but also as a social choice correspondence, over both profiles of linear ballots and profiles of ballots allowing ties.
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452627.154832
The intersection of development and evolution has always harbored conceptual issues, but many of these are on display in contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (evodevo). These issues include: (1) the precise constitution of evo-devo, with its focus on both the evolution of development and the developmental basis of evolution, and how it fits within evolutionary theory; (2) the nature of evo-devo model systems that comprise the material of comparative and experimental research; (3) the puzzle of how to understand the widely used notion of “conserved mechanisms”; (4) the definition of evolutionary novelties and expectations for how to explain them; and (5) the demand of interdisciplinary collaboration that derives from investigating complex phenomena at key moments in the history of life, such as the fin–limb transition.
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452678.154843
Inflation remains a promising, yet speculative, account of structure formation in the early universe. In this paper, we provide a general account of what is needed to establish a speculative theory, and apply the account to inflation. Particular challenges for inflation are its flexibility as a phenomenological framework, and the lack of empirical access to test seemingly independent features of specific realizations of inflation. This makes it difficult to leverage initial empirical successes to learn further physical details about the inflationary epoch. One prima facie appealing response is to treat phenomenological accounts of inflation as effective field theories (EFTs), screening off details of higher-energy physics. We argue that inflation is a poor fit into the EFT framework due to its sensitivity to high-energy physics. We close by stating specific recommendations to take steps towards establishing inflation as part of a theory of the early universe that follow from our approach.
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452703.154854
In this article, the suppositional account and different approaches of relevance conditionals are analysed on a specific type of conditional: Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent have a relevance connection, but where the acceptability of the antecedent has no influence on the acceptability of the consequent. Such conditionals occur in cases of multiple implication of a consequent, as in overdetermination. When evaluating such conditionals, the approaches examined lead to different and partly incoherent results. It is argued that approaches to conditionals should consider such conditionals acceptable, which is a challenge for e.g. approaches based on statistical measures. Furthermore, it is argued that the probability of a conditional should be evaluated only according to the strength of the relevance connection between the antecedent and the consequent, but not according to other relevance connections. It is shown that only two approaches correctly evaluate such conditionals, one of which, inferentialism, may provide a basis for a coherent theory of conditionals.
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460536.154868
here). In the screenshot, the markers 1 and 2 are landmarks, identified and outlined in green with OpenCV library code, and then the phone uses their positions and the accelerometer data to predict where the control markers 3 and 4 are on the screen, outlining them in red. …
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474962.15489
It is intuitive to think that animals communicate. This intuition
shapes our everyday interactions with animals, and guides much
empirical and theoretical research. Pet owners take their cats’
meows to be requests for food, and interpret their dogs’ play
bows as invitations to play. Meanwhile, scholars argue that bees use
their dances to communicate information about the location of food,
and that the flashing behaviours of fireflies communicate sexual
availability to potential mates. But what is animal communication? While it may seem obvious to us that animals communicate, it is more
difficult to say what makes their behaviours communicative.