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56841.264025
The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other “architects” of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology’s scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals Evolution and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term ‘progress’ across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of ‘progress’ is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of ‘progress’ in 20th-century evolutionary biology.
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99890.26422
Journal of the American Philosophical Association () – © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/.), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
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108021.264254
In our “New Possibilities for Fair Algorithms,” the key to avoiding the famous impossibility result for Calibration and Equalized Odds (Kleinberg et al., 2017) is to replace Calibration with a weaker condition we call Spanning. Spanning requires that, for each relevant group, an assessor’s predictions capture the group base rate in the sense that the base rate lies within the interval spanned by the assessor’s forecasts. We are grateful for Benjamin Eva’s critical and constructive engagement with our proposal. Eva is responsible for what has so far been the most interesting fairness criterion proposed in the philosophy literature: Base Rate Tracking (Eva, 2022). In his comment on our paper, he emphasizes the “intra-group” nature of Spanning—it imposes a constraint on the assessments within each group rather than requiring some parity in assessment to hold across groups—and suggests an alternative to Spanning that he dubs Spacing. Spacing is essentially a form of intra-group Base Rate Tracking.
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113512.264272
The original architects of the representational theory of measurement interpreted their formalism operationally and explicitly acknowledged that some aspects of their representations are conventional. We argue that the conventional elements of the representations afforded by the theory require careful scrutiny as one moves toward a more metaphysically robust interpretation by showing that there is a sense in which the very number system one uses to represent a physical quantity such as mass or length is conventional. This result undermines inferences which impute structure from the numerical representational structure to the quantity it is used to represent.
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114548.264289
The shift from classical to relativistic physics significantly altered our conception of time. From a picture of space and time as autonomous concepts, and of reality as divided into moments of time, relativity theory introduced a picture of four-dimensional spacetime, and a ‘static’ or ‘block universe’ conception of time. This paper considers how exactly relativity theory clashes with our ordinary folk conception of time and what this ultimately means for how we should think about the nature of time.
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142356.264301
Introductory Note: I will be in Nice next week to participate in the inaugural conference of the Institut fédératif de recherche en épistémologie (Federative Institute for Research in Epistemology) of the University of Côte d’Azur. …
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149980.264321
When one performs an action, one normally knows what one is doing. What explains this kind of self-knowledge? This chapter proposes that knowledge of one’s own actions is explained by the fact that, normally, one self-attributes actions through a certain method: One forms beliefs about the actions that one performs based on one’s motives for performing those actions. The proposed method is analogous to the 'looking outwards' method discussed in the literature on self-knowledge and the transparency of belief. The proposed method for self-attributing actions is argued to generate self-knowledge, and it is compared to two other accounts of self-knowledge for action in the literature; accounts which rely on the notion of intention.
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150010.264335
This chapter explores the similarities and the differences between delusion and self-deception. Delusion and self-deception are similar in some ways. For that reason, it is reasonable to wonder whether delusions are, perhaps, a type of self-deception or whether, conversely, being self-deceived is simply a way of being deluded. It is tempting, in other words, to consider the possibility that we might be able to subsume one of the two conditions under the other one. In this chapter, I will argue that this temptation should be resisted. First, I offer a rough characterisation of both delusion and self-deception. Then, I highlight the respect in which the two conditions are alike: Both conditions seem to involve beliefs which appear to be unresponsive to evidence. Next, I discuss several respects in which the two conditions are different: Firstly, they have different aetiologies. Also, their social impact and their impact on the subject’s well-being is different. The normative aspects of self-deception and delusion are different as well. And, finally, they have different connections to psychopathology, and to the notion of mental illness. For all these reasons, I conclude, delusion and self-deception should be pulled apart as two separate conditions.
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150552.264349
Alice, Bob and Carl are triumvirate that unanimously votes for some legislation, for the following reasons:
Alice thinks that hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment. …
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162655.264362
Last century, Michael Dummett argued that the principles of intuitionistic logic are semantically neutral, and that classical logic involves a distinctive commitment to realism. The ensuing debate over realism and anti-realism and intuitionistic logic has now receded from view. The situation is reversed in mathematics: constructive reasoning has become more popular in the 21st century with the rise of proof assistants based on constructive type theory. In this paper, I revisit Dummett’s concerns in the light of these developments, arguing that both constructive and classical reasoning are recognisable and coherent assertoric and inferential practices.
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195063.264374
This second of November’s stops in the leisurely cruise of SIST aligns well with my recent Neyman Seminar at Berkeley. Egon Pearson’s description of the three steps in formulating tests is too rarely recognized today. …
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200294.264388
Propositional attitudes have an attitude type (belief, desire, etc. ), and a content. A popular idea in the literature on intentionality is that attitude type is determined by functional role and content in some other way. …
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227581.2644
Inspired by Bentham’s Bulldog, I recently donated $1000 to the Shrimp Welfare Project. I don’t know that it’s literally “the best charity”—longtermist interventions presumably have greater expected value—but I find it psychologically comforting to “diversify” my giving,1 and the prospect of averting ~500 hours2 of severe suffering per dollar seems hard to pass up. …
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227581.264419
If you are not yet a fan of Michael Huemer, you should be. Hyperbole is the worst thing in the universe, but I still affirm the following:
Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority is the best book on political philosophy. …
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229499.264438
Conformity is the tendency to modify one’s behaviour to match the behaviour of others. Lisciandra et al. (2013) introduced the concept of conformorality to refer to the susceptibility of moral judgements to conformity. While it is often suggested that conformorality is generally bad, recent interdisciplinary work indicates that conformorality can also promote epistemically and morally positive outcomes under certain conditions. In the literature, little attention has been paid to the geometry of urban spaces. Here we combine results from the philosophy and psychology of conformity with general insights from urban studies to distinguish three ways in which the geometry of urban spaces might relate to conformorality, namely: urban spaces can exemplify, afford, or constitute conformorality. This paper’s analysis contributes a more nuanced understanding of the different faces of conformorality, as well as their bearing on urban planning and city living.
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229873.264452
In recent years, several scientific disciplines have been undergoing replication crises, and in response, preregistration has been offered as a solution to replicability problems. In this paper, I will draw connections between this new focus on preregistration and an older debate in the philosophy of science, namely predictivism—the thesis that predictions are epistemically superior to accommodations. Specifically, I shall argue that predictivism justifies preregistration. As it turns out, predictivists of all stripes have subtly different reasons to support preregistration. This unity is significant because firstly, preregistration proponents often seem to be implicitly committed to stronger versions of predictivism, but strong predictivism has long been deemed untenable by philosophers of science. Furthermore, the efficacy of preregistration in dealing with Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) like p- hacking and HARKing is at best contentious, which blocks a straightforward empirical justification of preregistration. Although empirical validation of preregistration—which need not be based on preventing QRPs—will eventually be required, it would be nice to have a principled justification for preregistration while we await the empirical evidence. I will also argue that preregistration offers something in return to predictivism: the former bolsters the latter by serving as a counterargument to accommodationism—the antithesis of predictivism.
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229938.264464
Nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (QM) works perfectly well for all practical purposes. However once one admits that a successful scienti c theory is supposed not only to make predictions but also to tell us a story about the world in which we live, a philosophical problem emerges: in the speci c case of QM, it is not possible to associate with the theory a unique scienti c image of the world; there are several images. The fact that the theory may be compatible with distinct ontologies, and that those ontologies may themselves be associated with a plurality of metaphysical approaches, gives rise to the problem of metaphysical underdetermination. This paper concludes that the available metametaphysical criteria fail to deliver objectivity in theory choice, and it puts forward its own criterion based on a tension between two methods of metaphysical inquiry: one that is closely related to science and another that is not.
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252802.264477
Understanding the actions of others is fundamental for human social life. It builds on a grasp of the subjective intentionality behind behavior: one action comprises different things simultaneously (e.g., moving their arm, turning on the light) but which of these constitute intentional actions, in contrast to merely foreseen side-effects (e.g., increasing the electricity bill), depends on the description under which the agent represents the acts. She may be acting intentionally only under the description “turning on the light,” but did not turn on the light in order to increase the electricity bill. In preregistered studies (N = 620), we asked how adults and children engage in such complex subjective action interpretation and evaluation in moral dilemmas. To capture the deep structure of subjects’ representations of the intentional structures of actions, we derived “act trees” from their response patterns to questions about the acts. Results suggest that people systematically distinguish between intended main and merely foreseen side-effects in their moral and intentionality judgments, even when main and side-effects were closely related and the latter were harmful. Additional experimental conditions suggest that, when given ambiguous information, the majority of subjects assume that agents act with beneficial main intentions. This “good intention prior” was so strong that participants attributed good intentions even when the harmful action was no longer necessary to resolve the dilemma (Study 2). These methods
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286197.264517
In his dialogues, Plato presents different ways in which to understand the relation between Forms and particulars. In the Symposium, we are presented with yet another, hitherto unidentified Form-particular relation: the relation is Love (Erôs), which binds together Form and particular in a generative manner, fulfilling all the metaphysical requirements of the individual’s qualification by participation. Love in relation to the beautiful motivates human action to desire for knowledge of the Form, resulting in the lover actively cultivating and bringing into being new beauty in the world, and in herself.
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335702.264533
MeerKAT is an amazing array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa. Astronomers want to expand this to the Square Kilometer Array, which will actually consist of thousands of telescopes in South Africa and Australia. …
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384645.264552
We investigate whether ordinary quantification over objects is an extensional phenomenon, or rather creates non-extensional contexts; each claim having been propounded by prominent philosophers. It turns out that the question only makes sense relative to a background theory of syntax and semantics (here called a grammar) that goes well beyond the inductive definition of formulas and the recursive definition of satisfaction. Two schemas for building quantificational grammars are developed, one that invariably constructs extensional grammars (in which quantification, in particular, thus behaves extensionally) and another that only generates non-extensional grammars (and in which quantification is responsible for the failure of extensionality). We then ask whether there are reasons to favor one of these grammar schemas over the other, and examine an argument according to which the proper formalization of deictic utterances requires adoption of non-extensional grammars.
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384675.264569
Given any set E of expressions freely generated from a set of atoms by syntactic operations, there exist trivially compositional functions on E (to wit, the injective and the constant functions), but also plenty of non-trivially compositional functions. Here we show that within the space of non-injective functions (and so a fortiori within the space of non-injective and non-constant functions), compositional functions are not sufficiently abundant in order to generate the consequence relation of every propositional logic. Logical consequence relations thus impose substantive constraints on the existence of compositional functions when coupled with the condition of noninjectivity (though not without it). We ask how the apriori exclusion of injective functions from the search space might be justified, and we discuss the prospects of claims to the effect that any function can be “encoded” in a compositional one.
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394571.264581
Influence theory is a systematic study of formal models of the communicative influence of one person or group of people on another person or group. In that sense influence theory is an overarching philosophical discipline that includes aspects of decision theory and game theory as sub-disciplines as well as established models of de facto segregation, cultural change, opinion polarization, and epistemic networks. What we offer here is a structured outline of formal results that have been scattered across a range of disciplinary contexts from mathematics, physics and computer science to economics and political science, supplemented with a number of new models, emphasizing their place within the philosophical framework of a general theory of influence. What such an outline offers, we propose, is the prospect of new and important cross-fertilizations and expansions in formal attempts to model the diverse patterns of communicative influence.
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402789.264593
I suspect this is generally true: cases when one acts on what one is are primary and cases when one acts on what one identifies as are secondary. It is, thus, problematic to define any feature that is significantly rationally relevant to ordinary action in terms of what one identifies with. …
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402858.264612
This paper explores the emerging ethical and privacy challenges posed by brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), focusing on mind-reading BCIs that decode neural activity to interpret thoughts and intentions. As BCI technology progresses from medical applications to consumer markets, the stakes for personal privacy and autonomy rise exponentially. This work examines three unique privacy dilemmas, termed the “Impulsivity Problem”, the “Judgement Problem”, and the “Fingerprint Problem”. These issues emphasize that neural data, with its deeply personal and inextricable link to identity and thought, cannot be treated like conventional forms of information. Drawing on philosophical frameworks, particularly Foucauldian concepts of surveillance and biopower, this paper critically analyzes the potential for BCIs to create a new mode of privacy-infringing observation. To address these concerns, the study proposes a value-sensitive design (VSD) framework and provides a roadmap for ethically aligned BCI development.
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402886.264631
This paper revisits a debate in epistemic democracy about the value of the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem (Hong and Page 2004 and Page 2008) in supporting the claims of epistemic democrats in favor of more inclusive decision-making processes in politics. We conduct a systematic review of DTA results and conclude that while they generally support the epistemic claims of deliberative democrats, they also support reintroducing experts in certain contexts. We use these results to complicate Plato’s metaphor of the cave by identifying different areas within it where ordinary citizens, experts, or a mix of both are in a better position to make decisions.
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402956.264652
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics recognized a theory of causal inference that warrants more attention from philosophers. To this end, I design a tutorial on that theory for philosophers and develop a dialectic that connects to a traditional debate in philosophy: the Lewis-Stalnaker debate on Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM). I first defend CEM, presenting a new Quine-Putnam indispensability argument based on the Nobel-winning application of the Rubin causal model (the potential outcome framework). Then, I switch sides to challenge this argument, introducing an updated version of the Rubin causal model that preserves the successful application while dispensing with CEM.
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402985.264665
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther’s latest book, When Maps Become the World, is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of scientific representation. Its central premise is that a philosophical investigation concerning the making and employment of maps may enlighten scientific practices of representation in fields other than cartography. The book is structured around this premise in two main parts. In Part 1 (the ‘philosophy’ part), Winther engages in what he calls ‘map thinking’: a philosophical reflection on what standard geographic maps are and how they are made and used (p. 4). In Part 2 (the ‘science’ part), Winther assesses how the results of his philosophical reflection on maps bear on different cases of scientific representation.
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403011.264682
This paper explores the artificial intelligence (AI) containment problem, specifically addressing the challenge of creating effective safeguards for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence. I argue that complete control—defined as full predictability of AI actions and total adherence to safety requirements—is unattainable. The paper reviews five key constraints: incompleteness, indeterminacy, unverifiability, incomputability, and incorrigibility. These limitations are grounded in logical, philosophical, mathematical, and computational theories, such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the halting problem, which collectively prove the impossibility of AI containment. I argue that instead of pursuing complete AI containment, resources should be allocated to risk management strategies that acknowledge AI’s unpredictability and prioritize adaptive oversight mechanisms.
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403038.264694
Policy Highlights To achieve the recommendation stated in the title, we propose the following: • EU climate adaptation policies need to further integrate local knowledge to advance epistemic justice and ensure their success. • A process indicator is proposed to advance epistemic justice along three main dimensions, namely distributive, participatory, and recognitional epistemic justice.