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4649816.350252
In his paper ‘The Road since Structure’ ([1991]), the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn emphasized the parallels between his own theory of scienti c development and biological evolution. His theory had been introduced almost thirty years before, in 1962, in the well-known book The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions. Three decades later, Kuhn showed that scienti c revolutions—those episodes in which a certain community of experts leaves behind a set of paradigmatic problems and problem-solutions to adopt a new one—split the scienti c community into two or more sub-groups, each of which in turn devotes its e orts to developing new problem-solutions for new problems. Scienti c development has thus the appearance of ‘a layman’s diagram for a biological evolutionary tree’ (Kuhn [1991], p. 98). Each new branch in that tree usually deals with increasingly specialized issues with increasing success, and this is part of the evidence of scienti c progress. Communication between these specialities tends to be limited. Kuhn’s lexical theory helped to show why, and provided reason to think of this limitation as a welcome consequence.
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4649836.350549
A few remarkable examples of alternative cosmological theories are shown, ranging from a compilation of variations on the Standard Model (inhomogeneous universe, Cold Big Bang, varying physical constants or gravity law, zero-active mass, Milne cosmology, cyclical models), through the more distant quasi-steady-state cosmology, plasma cosmology, or universe models as a hypersphere such as the Dynamic Universe, to the most exotic cases including static models with non-cosmological redshifts of galaxies. Most cosmologists do not usually work within the framework of alternative cosmologies very different from the standard one because they feel that these are not at present as competitive as the standard model. It is true that they are not so developed, but that is because cosmologists do not work on them. This vicious circle is to a great extent due to a sociological phenomenon known as the “snowball effect”, in which resources are distributed to the most successful theory at a given time; the effect acts as a potential in a field that attracts cosmologists, causing funds, research positions, prestige, telescope time, publication in top journals, citations, conferences, and other resources to be dedicated almost exclusively to standard cosmology.
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4649857.350589
Recently, Alvarado (2024) provided a conceptual framework to individuate and identify a specific kind of loneliness, namely epistemic loneliness. According to him, epistemic loneliness arises in virtue of and responds primarily to an absence of epistemic partners— i.e., willing, able, and actually engaged epistemic peers — as well as the lack of opportunities to engage with such. In this paper I argue that Alvarado’s framework and conceptual analysis of epistemic loneliness allows us to identify yet another kind of loneliness, namely one that can only be addressed at an axiological level. As we will see, this loneliness arises in virtue of and is particularly responsive to value-affirming, value-creating, and value exchanging circumstances, peers and contexts. Given its source and the factors which have an effect on it (either increase it or decrease it), this kind of loneliness is significantly distinct from epistemic loneliness. As will be shown here, we can have axiologically antagonistic epistemic partners. If this is so, it is possible that one can have epistemic partners, in the sense defined by Alvarado, and still be axiologically lonely. Axiological loneliness may prove to be even more central than epistemic loneliness already is to a person’s social, psychological and personal sense of belonging and hence of well-being.
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4654414.350614
1. Bias defined. A bad thermometer is one that often gets the temperature wrong. In one case, the errors are random: sometimes too high (say, it reads 74 when the temp is 72), sometimes too low. In another, the errors are systematic—it tends, say, to read too high. …
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4681563.350638
This paper gives a semantic analysis of ‘completion-related verbs of absence’ such as 'lack' and 'be missing' in English. The analysis is based on the notion of a conceptual (integrated or ideal) whole, the notion of a variable object and its variable parts, and an ontology of 'lacks' as entities whose satisfaction involves parts. The semantics will be embedded into that of object-based truthmaker semantics of modals.
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4694053.350672
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Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem? The science is clear and not really in question. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is well-understood (and has been known for over a century). …
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4726109.350696
What’s a poor reviewer to do? Skimming the advance proofs of a well-promoted book by a noted expert, you discover that its reasoning is full of holes—or rather, is one cavernous hole, a Grand Canyon of fallacy, camouflaged by science and slick prose. …
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4742626.350721
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say “this is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. —Rousseau How does one come to acquire property, that is, rightful ownership in something that was previously unowned and, by so doing, exclude all others from its rightful use? The distinction between mine and thine also creates the distinction between use and theft and, as Rousseau noted, is the true source of human inequality (1755, 69). One prominent answer to this question is that one can rightfully acquire ownership of something that was previously unowned by improving it through one’s labor. One can come to own an unowned plot of land, for instance, by farming or building on the land. The classic philosophical source for this view is Locke’s 2nd Treatise on Government. There, Locke argues that since we own ourselves and our labor, once we “mix” our labor with a thing, we make it our own.
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4742641.350748
The adoption of formal and empirical tools has become commonplace in mainstream philosophy. The analytic revolution at the beginning of the last century was born largely out of advances in formal logic, which exposed and clarified a new set of philosophical problems. As philosophical questions increasingly overlapped with questions in cognitive science and linguistics, tools from those disciplines also became more common in philosophy. Many of the early innovators in decision theory and game theory were also philosophers (e.g., John Harsanyi, Richard Jeffrey, David Lewis) and those tools were quickly seen as important in philosophical investigation. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the empirical methods of the social and natural sciences, especially their most powerful method—randomized experiments—were slow to be adopted, only becoming widespread in the early part of the 21st century. It is too soon to say that experimental philosophy has transitioned from a topic to a commonly accepted tool, but it is certainly more common deployed and accepted as legitimate than it was 20 years ago.
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4742658.350773
Agreement is at the heart of many theories of political justification, most notably in social contract theories.¹ In its most general form, political contractualism is the view that political life’s fundamental principles, norms, or rules are justified because they can garner public agreement in some form. The problem I will identify and attempt to remedy in this chapter is one common to theories of political contractualism. It is found in contractual theories, not because of any distinctive defect in contractual theories; rather, the issue is a general one in political philosophy that is easier to diagnose in these theories, because they wear their justificatory structure on their sleeve. They raise the justificatory bar explicitly in ways that most other theories do not.
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4742700.350789
ustice, ohn Rawls famously argued, is the first virtue of social institutions. ustice, in this sense, structures social cooperation. More precisely, principles of ustice provide a framework for evaluating the social rules that govern society, understood as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage (Rawls 1971, 4). As he puts it, a set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages and for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares (4). Principles of ustice structure the basic rights, the duties, and the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life. ustice is a solution to a fundamental problem in political philosophy. The exercise of political power involves coercion. In a society of free and equal citizens, coercion needs ustification to distinguish it from mere force. There are two classic solutions to this problem. Both rely on ustifying the use of political power, but they rely on different sources of that ustification. One ustifies the use of political coercion by referencing an end that the exercise of such power is meant to fulfill. Politics is ustified insofar as it achieves or aims at some otherwise valuable or attractive situation for society. This can take many forms, but from Plato to Rawls, one common goal is ustice, or a ust society. Insofar as political power is used in pursuit of ustice, its legitimacy is secure.
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4742716.350802
Evolutionary, game-theoretic approaches to justice and the social contract have become increasingly popular in contemporary moral and political philosophy. (Vanderschraaf, Strategic justice: convention and problems of balancing divergent interests, Oxford University Press, 2019) theory of strategic justice represents the most recent contribution to this tradition and, in many ways, can be viewed as a culmination of it. This article discusses some of the central features of Vanderschraaf’s theory and relates them to the contributions in this collection. Some of the contributions directly address Vanderschraaf’s work, while others explore related topics in game theory, bargaining theory, formal philosophy, rationality, equality, justice, and the theory of conventions. This collection aims to bridge a gap between disjoint but closely related literature spanning a wide range of disciplines. The contributions allow readers to systematically engage with the topic of strategic justice, advance dialogue, and more easily follow this rich and expanding field of study.
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4765120.350814
The rationale suggests that physical symmetries (in this case, time-reversal symmetry) are somehow informative with respect to the nature of the world (in this case, whether it comes equipped with a direction of time). This inference has been supported by many philosophers and physicists in recent years, so we do not put it into question here (see [8–14]; for criticisms, see [15–17]). We rather focus on (most) laws of physics being time-reversal-invariant as a premise in this argument. But what does it mean exactly to time-reverse a dynamical law (or a physical system)? In this clarificatory paper, we want to flag that time-reversal invariance is not like the rest of the spatial-temporal symmetries. We argue that it is entangled not only with various conceptual problems around what it is meant by time, but also with problems around its formal implementation across physical theories.
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4765138.350826
Primitivism about the direction of time is the thesis that the direction of time does not call for an explanation because it is a primitive posit in one’s ontology. In the literature, primitivism has in general come along with a substantival view of time according to which time is an independent substance. In this paper, we defend a new primitivist approach to the direction of time –relational primitivism. According to it, time is primitively directed because change is primitive. By relying on Leibnizian relationalism, we argue that a relational ontology of time must be able to distinguish between spatial relations and temporal relations to make sense of the distinction between variation and change. This distinction, however, requires the assumption of a primitive directionality of change, which ushers in the direction of time. Relational primitivism is an attractive view for those who want to avoid substantivalism about time but retain a primitive direction of time in a more parsimonious ontology.
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4765157.350839
In this paper I argue that the concept of time-reversal invariance in physics suffers from metaphysical underdetermination, that is, that the concept may be understood differently depending on one’s metaphysics about time, laws, and a theory’s basic properties. This metaphysical under-determinacy also affects subsidiary debates in philosophy of physics that rely on the concept of time-reversal invariance, paradigmatically the problem of the arrow of time. I bring up three cases that, I believe, fairly illustrate my point. I conclude, on the one hand, that any formal representation of time reversal should be explicit about the metaphysical assumptions of the concept that it intends to represent; on the other, that philosophical arguments that rely on time reversal to argue against a direction of time require additional premises.
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4806093.350851
Game theorists and foreign policy analysts have known for long that it sometimes pays off to make others believe that you’re irrational or even “mad.” To understand why, consider the general structure of what can be called the Commitment Problem:
(i) You would want (because this is in your interest) that Other does X. …
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4822116.350863
The problem of the priors is well known: it concerns the challenge of identifying norms that govern one’s prior credences. I argue that a key to addressing this problem lies in considering what I call the problem of the posteriors—the challenge of identifying norms that directly govern one’s posterior credences, which then induce constraints on the priors via the diachronic requirement of conditionalization. This forward-looking approach can be summarized as: Think ahead, work backward. Although this idea can be traced to Freedman (1963), Carnap (1963), and Shimony (1970), it has received little attention in philosophy. In this paper, I initiate a systematic defense of forward-looking Bayesianism, addressing potential objections from more traditional views (both subjectivist and objectivist) and arguing for its advantages. In particular, I develop a specific approach to forward-looking Bayesianism—one that treats the convergence of posterior credences to the truth as a fundamental rather than derived normative requirement. And I argue that this convergentist approach is crucial for a Bayesian justification of Ockham’s razor and for establishing a Bayesian foundation for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
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4857677.350881
Humans are a di erent kind of animal. Our species has a bigger ecological range, cooperates on larger scales, and makes greater use of tools than any other vertebrate species. Many scholars argue that these novel features of human biology are the result of enhanced cognitive ability, especially the ability to create causal explanations of natural phenomena. An alternative hypothesis holds that cumulative cultural evolution has a central role, and that causal reasoning plays a secondary role. This chapter reviews this debate arguing that there are a range of models that di er about the role of causal reasoning, trial-and-error learning, and biased cultural learning. It then presents a laboratory study that indicates that cumulative cultural evolution can occur without causal understanding and an eld study among Hadza hunter-gatherers that shows that the design of an essential foraging tool does not depend on a complete understanding of the costs and bene ts of alternative designs.
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4880468.350894
Einstein's special and general relativity emerged from his systematic analysis of three seminal thought experiments: chasing a light beam, the train-platform scenario, and the equivalence principle. Following this tradition of using Gedankenexperiments as core theoretical tools, we examine eight fundamental thought experiments through the lens of Presentist Fragmentalism - a framework positing that reality consists of fragments with independent A-series temporal flows connected by B-series relations. Our analysis spans both relativistic scenarios (Einstein's train) and quantum phenomena (EPR correlations, delayed choice eraser, Schrodinger’s Cat), demonstrating how this interpretation naturally resolves apparent paradoxes without sacrificing causality or introducing faster-than-light signaling. The framework's success in systematically resolving these diverse thought experiments, while preserving both relativistic and quantum principles, suggests it captures fundamental features of physical reality. Just as Einstein's resolution of three key paradoxes led to relativity, we argue that the consistent resolution of these eight Gedankenexperiments provides compelling support for Presentist Fragmentalism as a unified framework for understanding quantum and relativistic phenomena.
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4880487.350911
The validity of a virtual human-based research methodology, in which simulated humans are used to generate knowledge about real humans, depends on substantiating multiple correspondence claims which are currently indefensible. One must substantiate that real and virtual humans are sufficiently similar with respect to their (1) control structures, (2) environments and embodied experiences, (3) adaptive histories and attunements, (4) social and cultural contexts, and (5) institutional contexts. If one’s confidence in any of these correspondences is undermined, then the foundation of this approach will crumble.
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4880508.350925
What is active touch? A common conception of active touch gives a rough but rather intuitive sketch. That is, active touch can be understood as mainly object-oriented, controlled movement. While parts or the totality of this characterization is espoused by an important number of researchers on touch, I will argue that this conception faces important challenges when we pay close attention to each of its features. I hold that active touch should be considered as before all else purposive. This view has its roots in the active sensing literature in robotics but will be amended to give insight into human touch in the natural world.
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4938144.350937
It is often said that successful scientific research must be built on trust. Focusing on the alleged necessity of trust for successful scientific communication and thus for scientific cooperation (which underlies much of contemporary science), I argue that science mustn’t be built on trust. Appearances to the contrary come from a failure to distinguish different attitudes toward scientists’ testimony, in particular trusting and relying on other scientists. This article proposes an account of scientific reliance and explains how it differs from scientific trust; it also shows why this distinction matters for science.
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4938161.350949
In this article I study how the problem of time of canonical approaches to quantum gravity affects the simple minisuperspace models used in quantum cosmology. I follow some authors who have argued that this issue makes the quantization of general relativity problematic to conclude that the same applies in the case of quantum cosmology. In particular, I argue that temporal structures are lost in quantization and that this is a problem, as they encode part of the empirical content of classical cosmology, such as the age of the universe.
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4938191.350964
When choosing between two courses of action having the same two possible outcomes, we should choose the act for which the conditional chance of the preferred outcome, given its performance, is higher. This simple principle is, I argue, both a basic condition of instrumental rationality and the core of our conception of chance. To support this latter claim, I show that it in the presence of very weak rationality conditions on choice, the principle implies: 1. A version of Lewis’ Principal Principle (and that the converse is false). 2. Stochastic Dominance: a principle endorsed by all main theories of rational decision making under risk. 3. That the evidential and causal decision values of an act, conditional on the chances, are the same.
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4938227.350977
Quantum Mechanics has been the most spectacularly successful theory in the history of science. As is often mentioned the accuracy to which the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron can be calculated is a staggering nine decimal places. Quantum Mechanics has revolutionized the study of radiation and matter since its inception just over one hundred years ago. The impact of the theory has been felt in such fields as solid state physics, biochemistry, astrophysics, materials science and electronic engineering, not to mention chemistry, the subject of this conference. Quantum Mechanics offers the most comprehensive and most successful explanation of many chemical phenomena such as the nature of valency and bonding as well as chemical reactivity. It has also provided a fundamental explanation of the periodic system of the elements that summarizes a vast amount of empirical chemical knowledge. Quantum Mechanics has become increasingly important in the education of chemistry students. The general principles provided by the theory mean that students can now spend less time memorizing chemical facts and more time in actually thinking about chemistry. I hope that with these opening words I have succeeded in convincing the audience that I do not come before you to deny the power and influence of Quantum Mechanics in the field of chemistry.
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4938246.350991
In an article published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2003 I made a number of criticisms concerning what I saw as confusions and problems within the constructivist approach to chemical education (Scerri, 2003). Recently a response was published by the chemical educator, Keith Taber (Taber, 2010). I would now like to take this opportunity to the twentieth century. I believe that this presents a problem for Taber for two reasons. First of all, logical positivism is now a highly discredited view of the nature of science. Moreover, logical positivism has been traditionally, and rather contemptuously, derided by constructivist science educators (e.g., Spencer, 1999).
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4957551.351004
1. Trump’s proposal for the US to “take over” Gaza and expel its inhabitants is, like nearly everything else Trump has said and done over the past two weeks and indeed the past decade, completely batshit insane. …
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4995922.351015
How to explain the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect remains deeply controversial, particularly regarding the tension between locality and gauge invariance. Recently Wallace argued that the AB effect can be explained in a local and gauge-invariant way by using the unitary gauge. In this paper, I present a critical analysis of Wallace’s intriguing argument. First, I show that the unitary gauge transforms the Schrodinger equation into the Madelung equations, which are expressed entirely in terms of local and gauge-invariant quantities. Next, I point out that an additional quantization condition needs to be imposed in order that the Madelung equations are equivalent to the Schrodinger equation, while the quantization condition is inherently nonlocal. Finally, I argue that the Madelung equations with the quantization condition can hardly explain the the AB effect, even if in a nonlocal way. This analysis suggests that the unitary gauge does not resolve the tension between locality and gauge invariance in explaining the AB effect, but highlights again the profound conceptual challenges in reconciling the AB effect with a local and gauge-invariant framework.
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4995942.351027
The geometry of the universe is today widely believed to be flat based on combined data obtained during the 2000s. Prior to this, the geometry of the universe was essentially unknown. However, within the relevant literature one finds claims indicating a strong preference for a (nearly) closed universe, based on philosophical and other “non-experimental” reasons. The main aim of this article is to identify these reasons and assess the extent to which philosophical reasoning influenced the establishment of the dark matter hypothesis and the development of models for a closed universe. Building on groundwork laid by de Swart (2020), this study expands the discussion by (a) arguing that opinions on the geometry of the universe during the 1970s and 1980s were more divided than often assumed, (b) uncovering a lesser-known Machian argument for flat geometry proposed by Dennis Sciama, and (c) presenting a fine-tuning argument stemming from the ‘coincidence problem’ articulated by Robert Dicke. The study provides a nuanced perspective on how philosophical considerations contributed to shaping early views on cosmology and dark matter and highlights the significant role philosophical reasoning can play in guiding scientific inquiry in physics.
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4995961.35104
We introduce what we call the paradox of self consultation: This is the question of how apriori inquirers, like philosophers, mathematicians, and linguists, are able to (successfully) investigate matters of which they are initially ignorant by systematically questioning themselves. A related phenomenon is multiple grades of access: We find it extremely hard to think up analyses of our concepts that do not suffer from counterexamples; moderately hard to think up counterexamples to proposed analyses; and trivial to verify that a provided counterexample is genuine. We consider a range of potential explanations, including two-system approaches, and show why they are unsatisfactory, despite being on the right track. We then proceed to give a naturalistic solution to the paradox and multiple grades of access. In doing so, we present a novel theory of epistemic work, which we connect to formal learning theory.