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33889.160663
Klaus: Sometimes how well or badly off you are at time t1 depends on what happens at a later time t2. A particularly compelling case of this is when at t1 you performedan onerous action with the goal of producing some effect E at t2. …
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33889.160759
- There is a “minimal humanly observable duration” (mhod) such that a human cannot have a conscious state—say, a pain—shorter than an mhod, but can have a conscious state that’s an mhod long. The “cannot” here is nomic possibility rather than metaphysical possibility. …
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34741.160768
Hypotheses about how and why animals behave the way they do are frequently labelled as either associative or cognitive. This has been taken as evidence that there is a fundamental distinction between two kinds of behavioural processes. However, there is significant disagreement about how to define this distinction whether it ought to be rejected entirely. Rather than seeking a definition of the associative-cognitive distinction, or advocating for its rejection, I argue that it is an artefact of the way that comparative psychologists generate hypotheses. I suggest that hypotheses for non-human animal behaviour are often generated by analogy with hypotheses drawn from human psychology and associative learning theory, a justifiable strategy since analogies help to establish the pursuit-worthiness of a hypothesis. Any apparent distinction is a misleading characterisation of what is a complex web of hypotheses that explain diverse behavioural phenomena. The analogy view of the distinction has three advantages. It motivates the apparent existence of the distinction based on a common inference strategy in science, analogical reasoning. It accounts for why the distinction has been difficult to articulate, because of the diversity of possible analogies. Finally, it delimits the role of the distinction in downstream inferences about animal behaviour.
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67635.160783
This commentary aims to support Tim Crane’s account of the structure of intentionality by showing how intentional objects are naturalistically respectable, how they pair with concepts, and how they are to be held distinct from the referents of thought. Crane is right to reject the false dichotomy that accounts of intentionality must be either reductive and naturalistic or non-reductive and traffic in mystery. The paper has three main parts. First, I argue that the notion of an intentional object is a phenomenological one, meaning that it must be understood as an object of thought for a subject. Second, I explain how Mark Sainsbury’s Display Theory of Attitude Attribution pairs well with Crane’s notion of an intentional object and allows for precisification in intentional state attributions while both avoiding exotica and capturing the subject’s perspective on the world. Third, I explain the reification fallacy, the fallacy of examining intentional objects as if they exist independently of subjects and their conceptions of them. This work helps to bring out how intentionality can fit in the natural world while at the same time not reducing aboutness to some non-intentional properties of the natural world.
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70850.160792
We say we believe that all children can learn, but few of us really believe it.” Lisa Delpit Teachers are expected to believe in the potential of every student in front of them. To believe otherwise is to give up on a central premise of the educational mission, that students can be taught. However, the people who come into the classroom have different levels of knowledge, skills, and motivations. To deny that what the student brings to the classroom matters to their potential progress is to deny empirical reality. Teachers face a tension between cultivating high expectations for student success and recognizing the limitations that a student and their circumstances impose.
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82134.160803
— We present a reformulation of the model predictive control problem using a Legendre basis. To do so, we use a Legendre representation both for prediction and optimization. For prediction, we use a neural network to approximate the dynamics by mapping a compressed Legendre representation of the control trajectory and initial conditions to the corresponding compressed state trajectory. We then reformulate the optimization problem in the Legendre domain and demonstrate methods for including optimization constraints. We present simulation results demonstrating that our implementation provides a speedup of 31-40 times for comparable or lower tracking errors with or without constraints on a benchmark task.
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92446.160808
Magnetic monopoles, hypothetical entities with isolated magnetic charges (Dirac) or effective charges from field configurations (’t Hooft-Polyakov), are posited to symmetrize electromagnetism and explain electric charge quantization, yet remain undetected. This paper demonstrates that such monopoles—Abelian Dirac and non-Abelian ’t Hooft-Polyakov—are incompatible with a potential-centric ontology, where the gauge potential Aµ, fixed in one true gauge, the Lorenz gauge, is the fundamental physical entity mediating local interactions, as evidenced by the Aharonov-Bohm effect. We derive a no-go result, showing that magnetic monopoles require singular (e.g., Dirac strings) or non-unique (e.g., Wu-Yang patches) potentials in all gauges to resolve a Stokes’ theorem contradiction, violating the ontology’s requirement for unique, non-singular potentials in the true gauge. This result extends to sphalerons in SU(2) × U(1) electroweak theory and D-branes in string theory, whose Ramond-Ramond potentials Cp+1 exhibit an AB-like effect but require singular or non-unique potentials due to non-zero flux, leading to a theoretical self-contradiction independent of experimental evidence. In contrast, cosmic strings, with a non-singular, single-valued Aµ in a single gauge, satisfying Stokes’ theorem and the ontology’s criteria.
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92469.160814
In their recent paper published in Nature , Sharaglazova et al. report an optical microcavity experiment yielding an “energy-speed relationship” for quantum particles in evanescent states, which they infer from the observed population transfer between two coupled waveguides. The authors argue that their findings challenge the validity of Bohmian particle dynamics because, according to the Bohmian guiding equation, the velocities in the classically forbidden region would be zero. In this note, we explain why this claim is false and the experimental findings are in perfect agreement with Bohmian mechanics. We also clarify why the operationally defined speeds reported in the paper are unrelated to particle velocities in the sense described by Bohmian mechanics. In contrast to other recent replies , our analysis relies solely on the standard Bohmian guidance equation for single particles.
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92549.16082
Penultimate version. Forthcoming in A. Drezet (ed.): Pilot-wave and beyond: Louis de Broglie and David Bohm’s quest for a quantum ontology, Foundations of Physics 2023. The paper explains why the de Broglie-Bohm theory reduces to Newtonian mechanics in the macroscopic classical limit. The quantum-to-classical transition is based on three steps: (i) interaction with the environment produces effectively factorized states, leading to the formation of effective wave functions and hence decoherence ; (ii) the effective wave functions selected by the environment–the pointer states of decoherence theory–will be well-localized wave packets, typically Gaussian states; (iii) the quantum potential of a Gaussian state becomes negligible under standard classicality conditions; therefore, the effective wave function will move according to Newtonian mechanics in the correct classical limit. As a result, a Bohmian system in interaction with the environment will be described by an effective Gaussian state and–when the system is macroscopic–it will move according to Newtonian mechanics.
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92578.160826
The paper advances the hypothesis that the multi-field is a determinable, that is, a physical object characterized by indeterminate values with respect to some properties. The multi-field is a realist interpretation of the wave function in quantum mechanics, specifically it interprets the wave function as a new physical entity in three-dimensional space: a “multi-field” (Hubert & Romano 2018; Romano 2021). The multi-field is similar to a field as it assigns determinate values to N-tuples of points, but is also different from a field as it does not assign pre-existing values at each point of three-dimensional space. In particular, the multi-field values corresponding to the empty points (points where no particles are located) have indeterminate values until a particle is located at those points. The paper suggests that the multi-field so defined can be precisely characterized in terms of determinable-based, object-level, account of metaphysical indeterminacy. Under this view, the multi-field as novel physical entity is, in fact, a metaphysically indeterminate quantum object, that is, a determinable.
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92601.160832
The explanatory structure of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity is marked by complementarity: the existence of distinct, mutually incompatible descriptions that are nonetheless each empirically valid in specific observational settings. In recent work, Ryoo (2025) proposed a context-dependent mapping framework ( ) as an epistemic tool to capture this phenomenon. This framework maps each physically ?? defined “context” to a set of laws that yield coherent and predictive explanations within that context. In this paper, I formally define the notion of “context” underlying the mapping, offer a general structural ?? typology, and present case studies from quantum gravity and entanglement wedge reconstruction to illustrate how explanatory fragmentation is grounded in physical theory rather than epistemic limitation.
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93224.160839
In my new paper, “Severe Testing: Error Statistics versus Bayes Factor Tests”, now out online at the The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, I “propose that commonly used Bayes factor tests be supplemented with a post-data severity concept in the frequentist error statistical sense”. …
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137135.160845
Epistemologists have devoted an enormous amount of attention to justification. Hundreds of papers have tried to analyze the conditions under which a belief is epistemically justified; hundreds more have offered counterexamples to these analyses. Even epistemologists who look askance at conceptual analysis have found it fruitful to explore the connections between justification and other epistemic notions, such as knowledge, rationality, and evidence. Some have even suggested that justification is the central notion in epistemology.
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152872.160851
The Inscrutable Evidence Argument targets the thesis that credences are thoughts about evidential probabilities (CTEP). It does so using cases where one knows one’s evidence speaks either strongly in favor of or strongly against a proposition, but one doesn’t know which; in such cases, it seems possible to have a middling credence in that proposition even though one doesn’t think the probability of the proposition is near 50%—contra CTEP. In this paper, I defend CTEP by conceiving of the thoughts involved differently than usual. My diagnosis of the argument turns on appreciating the difference between believing and accepting (in the sense of Bratman 1992) that a proposition has probability n, where accepting is context dependent and allows for guidance in action without commitment to truth. I develop this diagnosis in two directions, one according to which acceptances of probability-involving propositions are credences and another according to which they aren’t. Both views elude the Inscrutable Evidence Argument and are compatible with CTEP.
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152894.160857
In a short note written in 1929, Frank Ramsey put forward a reliabilist account of knowledge anticipating those given by Armstrong (1973) and Goldman (1967), among others, a few decades later. Some think that the note comprises the bulk of what Ramsey has to say about epistemology. But Ramsey’s ideas about epistemology extend beyond the note. Relatively little attention has been paid to his reliabilist account of reasonable belief. Even less attention has been paid to his reliabilist account of reasonable degree of belief. In this paper, I spell out these aspects of Ramsey’s epistemology in more detail than has been done so far. I argue that Ramsey anticipates contemporary reliabilist accounts of justified belief and justified degree of belief. I also flesh out Ramsey’s reasons for being a reliabilist. This is worth doing since Ramsey has one of the earliest arguments for reliabilism, but it has received scarce attention. Also, Ramsey calls his reliabilism “a kind of pragmatism,” and examining the argument will help us clarify Ramsey’s pragmatist commitments and better understand his version of reliabilism. I argue that when viewed through contemporary lenses, Ramsey’s reliabilism contains revisionist elements: he’s not opposed to what we now call “conceptual engineering.”
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152943.160863
Emotions can get things right and serve us in many productive ways. They can also get things wrong and harm our epistemic or practical endeavors. Resenting somebody for having insulted your friend gets it wrong when your friend well understood that the remark was a joke. On the other hand, if your friend is not familiar with the given cultural context and hence couldn’t quite grasp the subtly sexist nature of the joke, your resentment might not only be appropriate but also help her navigate the new social context. Hoping that your meeting with your supervisor will be productive might motivate you to prepare better but will be inappropriate if all your previous meetings were failures.
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152971.160868
Besides disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is to split your donations across all of the charities that are recommended by theories in which you have positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to your credence in the theories that recommend it. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already widely used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars, it is not supported by any account of handling decisions under moral uncertainty that has been proposed thus far in the literature. This paper develops a new bargaining-based approach that honors the proportionality intuition. We also show how this approach has several advantages over the best alternative proposals.
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152993.160874
In the last half-century increased awareness of modal issues has been brought to bear on the free will debate. It has been argued that the context dependence of possibility claims can be exploited to mount a defence of compatibilism, the idea being that the kind of possibility to do otherwise ruled out by determinism is distinct from the kind of possibility to do otherwise needed for free will. The potency of this idea, however, is still under-appreciated. It is often confused with conditional analyses of alternative possibilities, and many assume that the forms of possibility the compatibilist points to are somehow less “categorical” than the incompatibilist’s preferred all-in possibility. Moreover, Christian List’s questionable agent-level compatibilism has recently become the main representative of the idea. In fact what is needed—so it is argued here—is to combine increased modal awareness with the traditional compatibilist picture of the relevant freedom being freedom from external compulsion.
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153045.160883
Contractual inflationists claim that contractual relationships are a source of noninstrumental value in our lives, to be engaged with for their own sake. Some inflationists take this to be the value of “personal detachment.” I argue that though personal detachment can indeed be valuable, that value is not plausibly considered noninstru-mental. Even on the most charitable reading of personal detachment—its potential to emancipate us from traditional social relations—these inflationists overlook that it may just as much lead to domination as traditional society does, only this time, due to alienation under market conditions. To salvage our intuitive sense of the emancipatory potential of contract, we can consider the detachment it makes possible to be a form of technology, casting the value of contract in a “merely” instrumental role. I conclude that if we are to reinvigorate the politics of the appeal to personal detachment in contract theory, we have to deflate its value.
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153125.160889
A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2—no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems—a fact which is sometimes spun as a “decision theoretic critique” of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of model-ling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk.
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153148.160894
Commemorative artefacts purportedly speak—they communicate messages to their audience, even if no words are uttered. Sometimes, such artefacts purportedly communicate demeaning or pejorative messages about some members of society. The characteristics of such speech are, however, under-examined. I present an account of the paradigmatic characteristics of the speech of commemorative artefacts (or, “commemorative artefactual speech”), as a distinct form of political speech. According to my account, commemorative artefactual speech paradigmatically involves the use of an artefact by an authorised member of a group to declare the importance of remembering a subject, in virtue of some feature of the subject. Then, I outline a variety of ways that commemorative artefactual speech can go awry. Such speech can be unauthorised, involve unfair exclusion or incorrect identification, be aesthetically inadequate, invoke clandestine explanations, and be directed at inappropriate subjects. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my account for resisting problematic commemorative artefactual speech.
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153198.1609
Modern generative AI systems have shown the capacity to produce remarkably fluent language, prompting debates both about their semantic understanding and, less prominently, about whether they can perform speech acts. This paper addresses the latter question, focusing on assertion. We argue that to be capable of assertion, an entity must meet two requirements: it must produce outputs with descriptive functions, and it must be capable of being sanctioned by agents with which it interacts. The second requirement arises from the nature of assertion as a norm-governed social practice. Pre-trained large language models that have not been subject to fine-tuning fail to meet the first requirement. Language models that have been fine-tuned for “groundedness” or “correctness” may meet the first requirement, but fail the second. We also consider the significance of the point that AI systems can be used to generate proxy assertions on behalf of human agents.
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153220.160905
Skeptical theists contend that human cognitive limitations undermine atheistic arguments from evil. One recent challenge to skeptical theism has been posed by Climenhaga (2025), who argues that if we should—as some skeptical theists argue— be agnostic about the probability of the total collection of evils we observe given theism, Pr(E|T), we should also be agnostic about the probability of theism given these evils, Pr(T|E), and therefore be agnostic with respect to God’s existence. If one is persuaded, as I am, that Climenhaga’s argument is correct, the most promising skeptical theist response available seems to be one of mitigation: concede that Pr(E|T) is not inscrutable—and thereby concede skeptical theism cannot undermine arguments from the total collection of observable evils to the nonexistence of God— but maintain that skeptical theism is still able to undermine other Bayesian problems of evil; namely, those which argue from some individual instance of observable evil to the nonexistence of God. However, as I will argue, this mitigation strategy is not viable: if Pr(Ei|T) is inscrutable, where Pr(Ei|T) is the probability of any individual instance of observable evil occurring given theism, so too is Pr(E|T) correspondingly inscrutable. Therefore, absent demonstrating Climenhaga to be incorrect, skeptical theism cannot undermine any Bayesian arguments from evil.
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153241.160911
Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, because it preserves the pleasure of an artwork’s incomprehensibility; the second holds that a lack of artistic understanding is conditionally valuable, as the enabling condition of a finally valuable relationship with an artwork. I defend orthodoxy by arguing that both versions of the objection fail and that we have no general reason against gaining artistic understanding.
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153265.160916
Refutation and Imagination Quentin Skinner, Michel Foucault, Raymond Geuss, David Graeber, and Bernard Williams, have recognised the importance of these imaginative resources in shaping methodological reflections. These thinkers are concerned that limiting the relevance of history to normative theorising exposes ahistoricist thinkers to imaginative failures. I argue that this is best construed as a concern about the epistemic reliability of their evaluative judgments. Imaginative failures can introduce biases that unjustifiably restrict the range of solutions to practical collective problems they contemplate. Historical research serves a normative function that is unavailable to the methodologically ahistoricist approach by preventing such failures.
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153289.160922
Suppose Socrates is looking at a bright red apple in good viewing conditions, so that it looks to him the colour it is. Schematically, Aristotle’s explanation of this “Good Case” is that the apple looks bright red to Socrates because he has taken on the perceptual form of bright red without the matter. But what happens if Socrates misperceives the apple instead and it looks purple? It is not at all clear how to apply Aristotle’s account of perception to such a “Bad Case.” Does Socrates still take on the perceptual form of the actual—bright red—colour of the apple in the Bad Case? Of purple? Neither? I argue that applying Aristotle’s account of perception to this sort of Bad Case requires that there are different ways of being in perceptual contact with perceptible qualities like the colour of an apple, depending on how that perceptual contact is mediated by changes in the sense organs and perceptual medium.
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168092.160927
The poet Blake wrote that you can
Today we’ll see a universe in an atom! We’ll see that states of the hydrogen atom correspond to states of a massless spin-½ particle in the Einstein universe—a closed, static universe where space is a 3-sphere. …
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194872.160933
What is the point of inquiry? Some say that the aim of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer; others, that the aim is to attain justified belief, epistemic improvement, or some other coveted epistemic status. Still others eschew “aim” talk altogether, and instead formulate norms governing inquiry. However, virtually all extant work on inquiry has agreed on at least this much: the aims or norms of inquiry can be specified in terms of the epistemic states of the inquirer (i.e., the agent conducting the inquiry). This paper argues that this conception of inquiry struggles to account for some central features of what is arguably the most successful form of inquiry in the modern era: scientific inquiry. We show that scientific inquiry is governed by several distinctive norms that are difficult to explain if inquiry is all about achieving epistemic benefits for the inquirer. Instead, many inquiries aim to confer epistemic benefits on others. This “inclusive” conception of inquiry has important advantages and implications.
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207946.160938
As an alternative to the long history of interpreting Artificial Intelligence as the attempt to rationalize and mechanize human ingenuity, thereby transcending nature and its perceived limits, this article proposes an interpretation of the conceptual foundations of Environmental Intelligence as the effort to develop digital technology and data-intensive algorithmic systems to sustain and enhance life on this planet. Thus articulated, EI provides a framework to challenge and redefine the philosophical premises of AI in ways that can explicitly spur the responsible and sustainable development of computational technologies towards public interest goals.
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207969.160944
Are absolute representations of reality—i.e., representations of reality from no particular point view—possible? Moore (1997) has offered abstract arguments for the following answer to this question: ‘yes, invariably’. But there are questions regarding whether (and how) this conclusion can be compatible with modern physics, where absolute representations often seem hard to come by. These questions were taken up by Jacobs and Read (2025) in the context of classical spacetime physics; here, we turn our attention to quantum mechanics. In particular, when the arguments of Moore (1997) are brought into contact with the ‘relational quantum mechanics’ of Rovelli (1996) and collaborators, one finds that the latter is unstable: either it is not relational view, or it is not a realist view.