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20476.358395
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Editor in Chief: Let’s start with some fan mail. Readers have asked about the recent cluster of essays touching, in one way or another, on religion. Can you talk about where they came from? …
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20477.358467
One of my more radical meta-philosophical views is that moral philosophers, collectively speaking, don’t have any clear idea of what they’re talking about when they talk about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. There are too many candidate concepts available, and no obvious reason to expect different theorists to have the same one in mind. …
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37451.358479
David Estlund has recently asked: how can structural injustice warrant resentment and indignation, given that it cannot fully be traced to culpable conduct? This article answers Estlund’s question. I propose that a social structure is an object that persists through time and is materially constituted by humans in relation. I use accounts of the point of blame to vindicate attitudes of resentment and indignation that target social structures themselves, without necessarily targeting their human constituents.
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51804.358488
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again. – Andre Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse
Thus reads one of the very few epigraphs that I remember well. …
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109462.358496
Perhaps the main question in the field of philosophy of chemistry has been whether chemistry reduces to quantum mechanics. The reason for this state of affairs is the simple fact that if chemistry does indeed reduce to quantum mechanics, then chemistry can be regarded as a subbranch of quantum physics with no relevant philosophical questions. Moreover, the reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics was regarded as a paradigmatic case of successful reduction in the time that logical positivism was the accepted view of the nature of science. Needless to say, the pioneers of the philosophy of chemistry have generally argued that chemistry does not in fact reduce to quantum mechanics and that it has its own interesting philosophical problems that are worthy of pursuing (Van Brakel, 2000).
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109482.358514
In this brief article I respond to Seifert’s recent views on the periodic law and the periodic table in connection with the views of philosophers regarding laws of nature. I argue that the author makes some factual as well as conceptual errors which are in conflict with some generally held views regarding the periodic law and the periodic table.
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109501.358527
The article contrasts the way that laws are regarded by some philosophers of science with the way that they are regarded by scientists and science educators. After a brief review of the Humean and necessitarian views of scienfic laws, I highlight difference between scientists who regard laws as being merely descriptive and philosophers who generally regard them as being explanatory and, in some cases, as being necessary. I also discuss the views of two prominent philosophers of science who deny any role for scienfic laws. I conclude that science educators should be wary of adopng the necessitarian view of scienfic laws.
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109520.358543
In this article I examine several related views expressed by Robin Hendry concerning molecular structure, emergence and chemical bonding. There is a long- standing problem in the philosophy of chemistry arising from the fact that molecular structure cannot be strictly derived from quantum mechanics. Two or more compounds which share a molecular formula, but which differ with respect to their structures, have identical Hamiltonian operators within the quantum mechanical formalism. As a consequence, the properties of all such isomers yield precisely the same calculated quantities such as their energies, dipole moments etc. The only means through which the difference between the isomers can be recovered is to build their structures into the quantum mechanical calculations, something that is carried out by the application of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
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109545.358569
It has been argued that inductive underdetermination entails that machine learning algorithms must be value-laden. This paper offers a more precise account of what it would mean for a “machine learning algorithm” to be “value-laden,” and, building on this, argues that a general argument from underdetermination does not warrant this conclusion.
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167191.358584
In philosophy, the empirical success of a science is often explained by the fact that it has managed to discover some law(s) of nature. This line of thought has not been thoroughly explored with respect to chemistry. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by showing how we could think about laws in chemistry. Specifically, it briefly presents how laws of nature are understood in philosophy of science. It then discusses two case studies from chemistry—the periodic table and chemical reactions—and explains how general ideas about law-hood can be applied to these cases. Lastly, it presents research questions and philosophical problems that arise by considering chemistry from the perspective of laws. This analysis illustrates that there is value in thinking about laws in chemistry.
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167219.358593
It has been over 60 years since Ernst Mayr famously argued for the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology. In the following decades, Mayr’s proximate-ultimate distinction was well received within evolutionary biology and widely regarded as a major contribution to the philosophy of biology. Despite its enormous influence, there has been a persistent controversy on the distinction. It has been argued that the distinction is untenable. In addition, there have been complaints about the pragmatic value of the distinction in biological research. Some even suggest that the distinction should better be abandoned. In contrast, Mayr had consistently maintained the significance of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology. There are also other attempts to defend the distinction. The paper examines the debate by taking an integrated History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) approach and argues for a functional approach to causal concepts in scientific practice.
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167235.358602
It is greatly to the credit of Anneli Je erson that she has managed to write a book on this oft-discussed topic that is actually interesting. It is also short and readable, twin virtues that make it an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a way into the debate or for a text to assign students. Je erson moves uently through the intellectual terrain, objecting to some versions of what ‘brain disorder’ might mean, before proposing her own version and then discussing the implications of her account for questions of agency and moral responsibility. This nal discussion on issues around moral responsibility is likely to make the book especially attractive for students and practitioners who want not just to learn about the metaphysics of psychopathology but also to get a wider sense of why it matters, and to connect the ontology with moral psychology. Philosophers of psychiatry are building connections with phenomenology and also looking for relevance in more applied areas, and the last chapter of the book will help anyone starting out to understand the literature connecting philosophical psychopathology with debates over agency and moral responsibility. I recommend that chapter heartily. Like much of the book, it is a model of clear, painstaking discussion of the issues, and you will bene t from reading it. I am going to focus, though, on the debate over whether mental disorders are brain disorders, which forms the core of the book.
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167251.358619
Very few researchers will have failed to notice that computing technology has been advancing rapidly, so that the landscape of computational tools and resources at our disposal looks completely di erent than a generation ago. Some researchers from the humanities and social sciences have embraced new ways of doing research, while many others have only a partial or passing awareness of the emerging computational research programmes within their elds. This book provides a fairly gentle and broad introduction to the new possibilities. This is a valuable contribution, since it would be a shame for the signi cant potential of computers to go untapped simply because people aren’t aware of this potential. For some sub- elds (such as social epistemology), computers have already been a game-changer.
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167267.358629
Sepkoski has written a history of the ‘extinction imaginary’, the immense variety of cultural ideas and expectations surrounding what has happened and what could (catastrophically) happen to life on Earth. As he skilfully argues, this has enabled ‘Western culture’s imaginary’ more broadly to seamlessly connect present ecological worries with narratives about ‘deep time’, from the earliest discovery of extinction to the contemporary claim, now taken to be self-evident, that biodiversity conservation is a good thing.
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167283.358639
In Science on a Mission, Naomi Oreskes aims to document how US Navy funding shaped research in oceanography from the twentieth century through to the present. The book seeks ‘to determine whether Navy patronage a ected the content of the scienti c work that was done and, if so, how’ (p. 9). Oreskes’s short answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her long answer consists of meticulous case studies on how the Navy’s interests came to shape the priorities and practices of American oceanography.
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167299.358648
In this transparently organized and argued book, Bird defends two main theses: that the aim of science is production of (scienti c) knowledge, and that even moderate empiricism is an incorrect account of the epistemology of science. The two theses are directly logically related by his account of evidence. Evidence, he maintains, is whatever can be used as a sound inferential basis for knowledge; and, at least in contemporary science that relies on sophisticated instruments, automated analysis, and distributed processing across specialist authors, this basis seldom if ever includes reports of anyone’s sense perceptions.
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167315.358657
Reproduction, after all, is a good yardstick for biological success. Organisms succeed when they leave more of their descendants in future generations. It is not, however, the only measure. Lineage persistence is another. On such a metric, the four extant species of horseshoe crabs are remarkably successful, having crawled around since the Ordovician. Though there are noticeable di erences, these two measures have a great deal in common. Both are about the continuation of lineages. This may be the lineage constituted by one’s o spring (and their o spring, and their o spring, and so on) in a breeding population. Or the lineage at stake might be the ‘meta-populational lineage’ of interbreeding organisms sticking it out over the generations.
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167331.358667
For many years any mention of consciousness in the context of quantum physics was generally restricted to those popular accounts that might be found on the ‘New Age’ or ‘Spiritual’ bookshelves. Certainly, in ‘mainstream’ philosophy of physics, the concept was regarded as de nitely non grata, following Putnam’s ([1961]) and Shimony’s ([1963]) famous set of critiques of the ‘consciousness causes collapse’ solution to the measurement problem in the early 1960s. Recently, however, consciousness has begun to tiptoe back into the limelight, as both explanans and explanandum. Here Shan Gao has collected seventeen contributions from prominent philosophers and physicists (including one Nobel Prize winner), which o er a disparate set of accounts of the role it might play. Following a helpful introductory orientation, these essays are grouped into three sections: ‘Consciousness and Wave Function Collapse’, ‘Consciousness in Quantum Theories’, and ‘Quantum Approaches to Consciousness’, although there is a certain degree of arbitrariness in the placement of some of the papers both within and between these divisions.
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167348.358676
Khalidi favours a mildly revisionist outlook within a non-essentialist yet realist framework—we won’t wholly abandon many concepts inherited from folk psychology, for example. He also a rms a form of nonreductionism about human cognitive kinds in which a distinction in individuation practices explains and justi es many-to-many structure–function mappings: cognitive kinds are externalistically individuated, while neural kinds are not (or ‘not usually’; p. 22, note 13). But the main purpose of the book is to put Khalidi’s causal-nexus account of natural kinds to work in cognitive science as it revises its ontology, in response to neuroscience or whatever else. In what follows I hope to convey my overall assessment that Khalidi’s book is informative, challenging, and awed in philosophically interesting ways.
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167365.358685
Baxter, J. [2023]: ‘Kolja Ehrenstein’s Causal Pluralism in the Life Sciences’, BJPS Review of Books, 2023 The last century of philosophical work has seen a proliferation of competing causal theories: regularity theory, probabilistic causality, counterfactual analyses, interventionism, process theory. It’s common to nd authors expressing the attitude that there is no single, universal theory of causation. Yet, these authors often mean di erent things by the term ‘pluralism’. With this book, Ehrenstein aims to achieve greater clarity and rigor concerning claims of causal pluralism in the philosophy of science literature. Ehrenstein is sceptical of numerous claims of pluralism about causality in the life sciences. He argues that some causal distinctions, such as Mayr’s ultimate and proximate cause, are inherently incoherent and do not amount to a meaningful pluralism. Other claims to pluralism, such as Elliot Sober and Stuart Glennan’s analyses of causal relevance and causal production, are not helpful in resolving the disputes they were purported to address. Still other proposed causal concepts, notably the concepts of permissive and instructive causes, are not genuine cases of causal pluralism.
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167383.358694
There is a story told over history and philosophy of biology camp res of a terror that once roamed these parts and scared biologists and philosophers alike: the essence monster. This was an ironic name, since if things have essences, monsters are the things that don’t, so the philosophers especially appreciated the paradox. However, like a good number of camp re stories, it is a fairy tale, mostly useful for scaring younglings. The essence monster is supposed to have killed progress in biology until Darwin freed us from the misperception that it was real. After that, the essence monster was itself killed o by the knights of the modern synthesis, until Michael Devitt revived it. Or so the new story goes. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear over a camp re.
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167402.358703
Heyes returns us to arguments about the nature and extent of heritable specialization (henceforth, domain speci city) in the cognitive phenotype synthesized in the 1990s by Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 9–16). Evolutionary Psychology integrates evidence about developmental canalization, selective de cits and dissociations, neural localization, inheritance, encapsulation of so-called system 1 from system 2 processes, learning theory, and evolutionary modelling, and argues that domain speci city is the result of genetic evolution. Of course, domain speci city associated with any or all of these ‘markers’ does not entail genetic evolution. However, Evolutionary Psychology links these considerations to the poverty of stimulus argument for innateness to provide an inference to the best explanation that genetic evolution explains domain speci city.
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167444.358712
Mathematics is the “language of nature,” a privileged mode of expression in science. We think it latches onto something essential about the physical universe, and we seek theories that reduce phenomena to mathematical laws. Yet, this attitude could not arise from the philosophies dominant before the early modern period. In orthodox Aristotelianism, mathematical categories are too impoverished to capture the causal structure of the world. In the revived Platonism of its opponents, the natural world is too corrupt to exemplify mathematical perfection. Modern mathematical science required a novel tertium quid, due to Pietro Catena.
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178822.358721
Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the most prominent
rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the
nineteenth-century. He stands out among his
contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T.
Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central
place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the
consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends
his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment
thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du
Bois, helped ensure Crummell’s continuing influence during the
rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such
relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston
emerged.
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279740.358728
We humans think a lot about agency – about what people do, about what they can do, and what they ought to do. I want to highlight four puzzles raised by the way we tend to approach these questions. None of the puzzles is new, but they are usually discussed in isolation; I will argue that they have a common source and a common solution. The first puzzle, to be discussed in sections 2 and 3, arises from two features of the “perspectival ‘ought’ ”. On the one hand, the perspectival ‘ought’ appears to supervene on the agent’s perspective or evidence. On the other hand, this sense of ‘ought’ seems to imply ‘can’. But couldn’t an agent lack information about what they can do?
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330908.358735
The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck.
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339180.358746
A strange aspect of the literature on metaethics is that most of it sees morality as a local phenomenon, located in specific acts or events (or people or outcomes). I guess this goes back to G.E. Moore, who asked what it means to call something 'good'. …
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376581.358753
This highly accessible series of Elements provides brief but comprehensive introductions to the most central topics in metaphysics. Many of the Elements also go into considerable depth, so the series will appeal to both students and academics. Some Elements bridge the gaps between metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology.
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397205.358762
The standard theory of choice in economics involves modelling human agents as if they had precise attitudes when in fact they are often fuzzy. For the normative purposes of welfare economics, it might be thought that the imposition of a precise framework is nevertheless well justified: If we think the standard theory is normatively correct, and therefore that agents ought to be in this sense precise, then doesn’t it follow that their true welfare can be measured precisely? I will argue that this thought, central to the preference purification project in behavioural welfare economics, commits a fallacy. The standard theory requires agents to adopt precise preferences; but neither the theory nor a fuzzy agent’s initial attitudes may determine a particular way in which she ought to precisify them. So before actually having precisified her preferences, the welfare of fuzzy agents may remain indeterminate. I go on to consider the implications of this fallacy for welfare economics.
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397225.358771
The idea that people make mistakes in how they pursue their own best interests, and that we can identify and correct for these mistakes has been central to much recent work in behavioural economics, and the ‘nudge’ approach to public policy grounded on it. The focus in this literature has been on individual choices that are mistaken. Agreeing with, and building on the criticism that this literature has been too quick to identify individual choices as mistaken, I argue that it has also overlooked a kind of mistake that is potentially more significant: irreducibly diachronic mistakes, which occur when series of choices over time do not serve our interests well, even though no individual choice can be identified as a mistake. I argue for the claim that people make such mistakes, and reflect on its significance for welfare economics.