-
32927.249974
This paper proposes a dynamic temporal logic that is appropriate for modeling the dynamics of scientific knowledge (especially in historical sciences, such as Archaeology, Paleontology and Geology). For this formalization of historical knowledge, the work is divided into two topics: firstly, we define a temporal branching structure and define the terms for application in Philosophy of Science; Finally, we define a logical system that consists of a variation of Public Announcement Logic in terms of temporal logic, with appropriate rules in a tableaux method.
-
92235.250128
This is Part II of my commentary on Stephen Senn’s guest post, Be Careful What You Wish For. In this follow-up, I take up two topics:
(1) A terminological point raised in the comments to Part I, and
(2) A broader concern about how a popular reform movement reinforces precisely the mistaken construal Senn warns against. …
-
97641.250188
Some philosophers hold that unstructured groups themselves, as opposed to the members of these groups, can have moral duties. There are different accounts of how such collective duties might be grounded in facts about individual duties of the group members. In this paper, I highlight and discuss some questions for these accounts that seem to warrant more exploration than they have received so far. First, if there is a collective duty to ϕ that is grounded in individual duties, how does ϕ-ing feature in the individual duties? The accounts that ground a collective duty to ϕ in individual duties specify these individual duties with reference to ϕ- ing. But if a collective duty to ϕ is grounded in individual duties, then, on pain of circularity, the individual duties cannot be specified in terms of a collective duty to ϕ. Second, are the individual duties that ground collective moral duties themselves also moral duties? Or are the individual duties, rather, rational duties? I will suggest that the individual duties should be classified neither as purely moral nor as purely rational, but rather as rational duties of moral agents. Finally, are the grounding individual duties perspective-dependent, i.e., do they depend on the epistemic situation of the members, as several philosophers have suggested? I argue that accounts of collective obligations should not commit themselves to an answer to this question, but rather leave the question to general ethical theories that do not focus on contexts of collective duties.
-
97693.2502
| The boundary problem in normative democratic theory is the problem of who should be entitled to participate in which democratic decision-making. The boundary problem is at the heart of many pressing political issues, including voting rights of resident aliens in their host countries and of expats in their home countries, the legitimacy of border regimes, the justi!ability of global democracy, and the democratic representation of future generations. The two most popular answers to the boundary problem are the
-
99080.250218
Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at the lovely views, she smells the flowers in season, she gathers mushrooms, she listens to the birds chirping, she climbs a tree, and so on. …
-
110250.250227
This paper deals with a rather wide range of topics, each one of which probably deserves (at least) a monograph-length study of its own, and for each one of which there is an extensive literature. There is no way that one can do justice to all of that in the span of a single paper. Now that may be a good reason not to try to do so, but rather to stick with one issue, one view. However, sometimes it can be useful to take a broad perspective, treat a variety of questions and observationsas making up a single subject matter, one that can be approached from various angles. Sure, that does result in a lack of detail, but one may hope that one makes good for that by showing connections that otherwisewould go unnoticed. This paper is written in that spirit.
-
114795.250236
Wouldn’t it be great if Democrats prioritized a drastic increase in American productivity, thereby deprioritizing safetyism, wokeness, and redistribution? That’s definitely my view, so I’m delighted that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (henceforth KT) have written a whole book — Abundance sans subtitle — defending that position. …
-
114796.250244
Some philosophers think that for your right action to be morally worthy you have to know that the action is right. On the contrary, there are cases where an action is even more morally worthy when you don’t know it’s right. …
-
117761.250254
Very short summary: In this essay, I discuss Gerald Gaus’s argument about the possibility of moral reconciliation in diverse societies. Like Gaus, I use an agent-based model to explore the conditions under which convergence toward a single social rule happens. …
-
119210.250263
Advocates of the explanatory indispensability argument for platonism say two things. First, we should believe in the parts of our best scientific theories that are explanatory. Second, mathematical objects play an explanatory role within those theories. I give a two-part response. I start by using a Bayesian framework to argue that the standards many have proposed must be met to show that mathematical objects are dispensable are too demanding. In particular, nominalistic theories may be more probable than platonistic ones even if they are extremely complicated by comparison. This is true even if there are genuine cases of mathematical explanation in science. The point made here is a matter of principle, holding regardless of how one assesses nominalistic theories already on offer. I then examine my recent nominalization of second-order impure set theory in light of the correct, laxer standards. I make a tentative case that my nominalistic theory meets those standards, which would undermine the explanatory indispensability argument. While this case is provisional, I aim to bring attention to my nominalization and others in light of the revised standards for demonstrating dispensability.
-
119232.250272
In this paper, I develop a “safety result” for applied mathematics. I show that whenever a theory in natural science entails some non-mathematical conclusion via an application of mathematics, there is a counterpart theory that carries no commitment to mathematical objects, entails the same conclusion, and the claims of which are true if the claims of the original theory are “correct”: roughly, true given the assumption that mathematical objects exist. The framework used for proving the safety result has some advantages over existing nominalistic accounts of applied mathematics. It also provides a nominalistic account of pure mathematics.
-
119255.250282
ground assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical necessity. Drawing parallels with the metaphysics of science (as applied to quantum foundations), we try to bring the realist assumptions of anti-exceptionalism to light, to demotivate the necessary connection between realism and anti-exceptionalism, briefly exploring the possibility of adopting antirealism as the background default view of science instead.
-
119291.250291
Recent philosophical literature on the epistemology of measurement has relegated measurement uncertainty to a secondary issue, concerned with characterizing the quality of a measurement process or its product. To reveal the deeper epistemological significance of uncertainty, we articulate the problem of usefulness, which is concerned with the tension between the specificity of the conditions under which particular measurements are performed and the broader range of conditions in which measurement results are intended to be – and are – used. This is simultaneously an epistemological and a practical problem.
-
119348.2503
The theory of quasi-truth was developed by Newton da Costa and collaborators as a more realistic account of truth, encompassing the incompleteness and inconsistency of scientific knowledge. Intuitively, the idea is that truth is reached when consensus is established at the end of inquiry; until that is reached, we have something less than the whole truth, we have partial or quasi-truth. Formally, the view faces some challenges that have been recently addressed in the literature; they concern a mismatch between the offered formalism and the expected claims to be formalized. In this paper we use inspiration from quasi-truth theory to develop an account of consensus in science encompassing the notion of quasi-truth. We not only present the formal system capturing the idea of a scientific consensus, but also show how quasi-truth may be represented within it too. We compare the original quasi-truth approach to ours, and argue that the latter is able to face some of the difficulties that plagued the former.
-
204207.250309
Spears and Geruso’s After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People releases today! In Part 1 of my review, I explained why we should be worried about below-replacement global fertility and subsequent depopulation. …
-
205660.250318
Anyone engaging with the history and philosophy of pseudoscience, particularly the demarcation problem, will quickly land on Karl Popper and the campaign of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists against irrational metaphysics. The demarcation problem – how to identify the hallmarks of a serious and universal science-pseudoscience distinction – began with demarcating science from metaphysical fraud and dilettantism. Not much is known, however, about the Circle’s attitude towards typical pseudoscientific activities like parapsychology and psychic phenomena, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, and the social role and responsibility of scientific philosophy with regard to fringe and pseudoscientific endeavors. This paper provides the first systematic approach to the early history of the demarcation problem, with a special focus on logical positivism, which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of a rational, socially engaged but fallible scientific philosophy in demented times. As it turns out, most logical positivists were not just interested in pseudoscience as skeptical experimenters, but viewed it as holding various values, merits, and promises that they even imagined to be compatible with their empiricist and scientific world conception.
-
205721.250328
We argue that semiclassical gravity can be rendered consistent by assuming that quantum systems only emit a gravitational field when they interact with stable determination chains (SDCs), which are specific chains of interactions modeled via decoherence and test functions obeying a set of conditions. When systems are disconnected from SDCs, they do not emit a gravitational field. This denies the universality of gravity, while upholding a version of the equivalence principle. We argue that this theory can be tested by experiments that investigate the gravitational field emitted by isolated systems like in gravcats experiments or by investigating the gravitational interactions between entangled systems like in the (Bose- Marletto-Vedral) BMV experiment. Our theory fits into a new framework which holds that in the absence of certain conditions, quantum systems cannot emit a gravitational field. There are many possible conditions for systems to emit a gravitational field, and we will adopt a subset of them. We will show how this subset of conditions provides multiple benefits beyond rendering semiclassical gravity consistent, which includes deriving the value of the cosmological constant from first principles and providing an explanation for why the vacuum does not gravitate.
-
287668.250338
Mike Huemer is the greatest philosopher. It is no hyperbole to say that he “taught me how to think.” He is also a confirmed ethical vegetarian who practices what he preaches. Nine years ago, I wrote this piece arguing that insects provide a strong reductio ad absurdum to Huemer’s view. …
-
290648.250346
|Source|
My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry into the independent evidential basis of claims (e.g. …
-
292094.250355
Philosophers of mind call Hempel’s dilemma an argument by (Crane and Mellor, 1990; Melnyk, 1997) against metaphysical physicalism, the thesis that everything that exists is either ‘physical’ or ultimately depends on the ‘physical’. Their argument is understood as a challenge to the idea of fixing what is ‘physical’ by appealing to a theory of physics. The dilemma briefly goes as follows. On the one hand, if we choose a current theory of physics to fix what is ‘physical’, then, since our current theories of physics are very likely incomplete, the so-articulated metaphysical physicalism is very likely false. On the other hand, if we choose a future theory of physics to fix what is ‘physical’, then, since future theories of physics are currently unknown, the so-articulated metaphysical physicalism has indeterminate meaning. Thus, it seems we can rely neither on current nor on future theories of physics to satisfactorily articulate metaphysical physicalism. Recently (Firt et al., 2022) argued that the dilemma extends to any theory that gives a deep-structure and changeable account of experience (including dualistic theories, although cf. Buzaglo, 2024).
-
377191.250364
David Suzuki is an 89-year-old Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster and environmental activist. In this interview he says some things that I’ve come to agree with. • ‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost, iPolitics, 2 July 2025. …
-
460544.250373
Apparently, Italy requires residents to secure a medical certificate before joining a gym, sports club, or other source of regular physical exercise. This is (very loosely) estimated to prevent a few deaths per year from sudden cardiac events but at a net cost of thousands of QALYs lost due to exercise deterrence. …
-
463490.250381
In the last NYRB, Kwame Anthony Appiah reviewed two recent books about translation. One is by Damion Searls, whose Tractatus I criticized in this space, provoked in part by his complaint about philosophers as translators of philosophy. …
-
464853.250389
In philosophy of science, the pseudosciences (like cryptozoology, homeopathy, Flat-Earth Theory, anti-vaccination activism, etc.) have been treated mainly negatively. They are viewed not simply as false, but even dangerous, since they try to mimic our best scientific theories, thus gaining respect and trust from the public, without the appropriate credentials. As a result, philosophers have traditionally put considerable effort into demarcating genuine sciences and scientific theories from pseudoscience. Since these general attempts at demarcation have repeatedly been shown to break down, the present paper takes a different and somewhat more positive approach to the study of pseudoscience. My main point is not that we should embrace and accept the pseudosciences as they are, but rather that there are indeed valuable and important lessons inherent in the study of pseudoscience and the different sections of the paper list at least six of them. By showing, through numerous examples, how (the study of) pseudoscience can teach us something about science, ourselves, and society, it makes the case that as philosophers, we should devote more time and energy to engaging with such beliefs and theories to help remedy their harmful effects.
-
549823.250398
How badly would it suck to die because a person who could have saved your life (along with the lives of four others tied to the train tracks beside you) preferred “allowing” to “doing”? A second was just about to save you when they realized that the side track—where just one person awaited as collateral damage—later loops back, turning the purportedly-collateral damage into an instrumental killing. …
-
551190.250406
The belief that beauty leads to truth is prevalent among contemporary physicists. Far from being a private faith, it operates as a methodological guiding principle, essentially when physicists have to develop theories without new empirical data.
-
551243.250414
Scenarios and pathways, as defined and used in the “SSP-RCP scenario framework”, are key in last decade’s climate change research and in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this framework, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) consist of a limited set of alternative socioeconomic futures, that are both represented in short qualitative narratives and with quantitative projections of key drivers. One important use of the computationally derived SSP-scenarios is to do mitigation analysis and present a “manageable” set of options to decision-makers. However, all SSPs and derivatively SSP-scenarios in this framework assume a globally growing economy into 2100. This, in practice, amounts to a value-laden restriction of the space of solutions to be presented to decision-makers, falling short of IPCC’s general mandate of being “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive”. Yet, the Global Economic Growth Assumption (GEGA) could be challenged and in practice is challenged by post-growth scholars.
-
551267.250423
Robustness of AI alignment is one of the safety issues of large language models. Can we predict how many mistakes will a model make when responding to a restricted request? We show that when access to the model is limited to in-context learning, the number of mistakes can be proved inapproximable, which can lead to unpredictability of alignment of the model. Against intuition, this is not entirely bad news for AI safety. Attackers might not be able to easily misuse in-context learning to break alignment of the model in a predictable manner because the mistake bounds of safe responses, which were used for alignment, can be proved inapproximable. This inapproximability can hide the safe responses from attackers and make alignment of the model unpredictable. If it were possible to keep the safe responses from attackers, responsible users would benefit from testing and repairing of the model’s alignment despite its possible unpredictability. We also discuss challenges involved in ensuring democratic AI alignment with limited access to safe responses, which helps us to make alignment of the model unpredictable for attackers.
-
621976.250432
There is a longstanding puzzle about empty names. On the one hand, the principles of classical logic seem quite plausible. On the other hand, there would seem to be truths involving empty names that require rejecting certain classically valid principles.
-
622026.250445
Consider the property of being something that is identical to Hesperus. For short, call this the property of being Hesperus. What is the nature of this property? How does it relate to the property of being Phosphorus? And how do these properties relate to the purely haecceitistic property of being v—the unique thing that has the property of being Hesperus and the property of being Phosphorus?