1. 412505.26974
    It’s an innocent and pleasant pastime to multiply counterexamples to utilitarianism even if they don’t add much to what others have said. Thus, if utilitarianism is true, I have to do to do so. :-) Suppose you capture Hitler. …
    Found 4 days, 18 hours ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  2. 416763.269805
    |A common sight in Europe: | poor person searching bare-handed through garbage bins in search of deposit bottles They are mistaken. While bottle deposit systems are superficially attractive they are a horrendously expensive way to do not much good, while also creating degrading and fundamentally worthless work for the poor. …
    Found 4 days, 19 hours ago on The Philosopher's Beard
  3. 469350.269814
    This chapter provides a theoretical lens on conceptual disruption. It offers a typology of conceptual disruption, discusses its relation to conceptual engineering, and sketches a programmatic view of the implications of conceptual disruption for the ethics of technology.
    Found 5 days, 10 hours ago on Michael Klenk's site
  4. 469382.26982
    We examine whether Thomsonian constitutivism, a metaethical view that analyses value in terms of ‘goodness-fixing kinds,’ i.e. kinds that themselves set the standards for being a good instance of the respective kind, offers a satisfactory explanation of value change and disagreement. While value disagreement has long been considered an important explanandum, we introduce value change as a closely related but distinct phenomenon of metaethical interest. We argue that constitutivism fails to explain both phenomena because of its commitment to goodness-fixing kinds. Constitutivism explains away disagreement and at best explains the emergence of new values, not genuine change. Therefore, Thomsonian constitutivism is not a good fix for realist problems with explaining value disagreement, and value change.
    Found 5 days, 10 hours ago on Michael Klenk's site
  5. 469419.269826
    Generative AI enables automated, effective manipulation at scale. Despite the growing general ethical discussion around generative AI, the specific manipulation risks remain inadequately investigated. This article outlines essential inquiries encompassing conceptual, empirical, and design dimensions of manipulation, pivotal for comprehending and curbing manipulation risks. By highlighting these questions, the article underscores the necessity of an appropriate conceptualisation of manipulation to ensure the responsible development of Generative AI technologies.
    Found 5 days, 10 hours ago on Michael Klenk's site
  6. 469436.269832
    Franke, in Philosophy & Technology, 37(1), 1–6, (2024), connects the recent debate about manipulative algorithmic transparency with the concerns about problematic pursuits of positive liberty. I argue that the indifference view of manipulative transparency is not aligned with positive liberty, contrary to Franke’s claim, and even if it is, it is not aligned with the risk that many have attributed to pursuits of positive liberty. Moreover, I suggest that Franke’s worry may generalise beyond the manipulative transparency debate to AI ethics in general.
    Found 5 days, 10 hours ago on Michael Klenk's site
  7. 587199.269837
    Mark Antony’s funeral oration is the turning point of Julius Caesar. Brutus had just finished his own speech, and seemed to persuade the people that the killing of Caesar was the justified killing of a tyrant. …
    Found 6 days, 19 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  8. 596687.269843
    A sucker, in American slang, is a person who is easily taken advantage of. We have too many suckers lately. Let me help you to be less of a sucker. 1. The Con The typical con has four elements: (1) A background Desire that you have that is unsatisfied, (2) a Story that appeals to that desire, (3) an Action the scammer wants you to do, (4) some supposed Connection between the Story and the Action, such that if you believe the Story, you are supposed to do the Action. …
    Found 6 days, 21 hours ago on Fake Noûs
  9. 645792.269848
    Sleeping Beauty, the renowned Bayesian reasoner, has enrolled in an experiment at the Experimental Philosophy Lab. On Sunday evening, she is put to sleep. On Monday, the experimenters awaken her. After a short chat, the experimenters tell her that it is Monday. She is then put to sleep again, and her memories of everything that happened on Monday are erased. The experimenters then toss a coin. If and only if the coin lands tails, the experimenters awaken her again on Tuesday. Beauty is told all this on Sunday. When she awakens on Monday – unsure of what day it is – what should her credence be that the coin toss on Monday lands heads?
    Found 1 week ago on PhilSci Archive
  10. 645860.269854
    Whether one realises it or not, chemistry is everywhere. What we eat; the drugs that cure our diseases; the detergents that we use to clean our clothes and houses, to climate change; the discovery of life in distant planets; understanding brain activity; and, photosynthesis- for everything, the study of chemistry is not just relevant but vital.
    Found 1 week ago on PhilSci Archive
  11. 645881.269863
    The physical meaning of the operators is not reducible to the intrinsic relations of the quantum system, since unitary transformations can find other operators satisfying the exact same relations. The physical meaning is determined empirically. I propose that the assignment of physical meaning to operators spreads through observation, along with the values of the observables, from the already observed degrees of freedom to the newly observed ones. I call this process “physication”. I propose that quantum observations are nothing more than this assignment, which can be done unitarily. This approach doesn’t require collapse, many-worlds, or a conspiratorial fine tuning of the initial conditions.
    Found 1 week ago on PhilSci Archive
  12. 645902.269869
    Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT reflect, and can potentially perpetuate, social biases in language use. Conceptual engineering aims to revise our concepts to eliminate such bias. We show how machine learning and conceptual engineering can be fruitfully brought together to offer new insights to both conceptual engineers and LLM designers. Specifically, we suggest that LLMs can be used to detect and expose bias in the prototypes associated with concepts, and that LLM de-biasing can serve conceptual engineering projects that aim to revise such conceptual prototypes. At present, these de-biasing techniques primarily involve approaches requiring bespoke interventions based on choices of the algorithm’s designers. Thus, conceptual engineering through de-biasing will include making choices about what kind of normative training an LLM should receive, especially with respect to different notions of bias. This offers a new perspective on what conceptual engineering involves and how it can be implemented. And our conceptual engineering approach also offers insight, to those engaged in LLM de-biasing, into the normative distinctions that are needed for that work.
    Found 1 week ago on PhilSci Archive
  13. 689417.269874
    By Hanzhe Dong and Gualtiero Piccinini Introduction What are biological functions, and how should we think about them? This question has been controversial in the philosophy of biology (and technology). …
    Found 1 week ago on The Brains Blog
  14. 694152.269881
    It is conventional wisdom that appreciating the role of luck in our moral lives should make us more sparing with blame. But views of moral responsibility that allow luck to augment a person’s blameworthiness are in tension with this wisdom. I resolve this tension: our common moral luck partially generates a duty to forgo retributively blaming the blameworthy person at least sometimes. So, although luck can amplify the blame that a person deserves, luck also partially generates a duty not to give the blameworthy person the retributive blame that he deserves at least sometimes.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on Robert J. Hartman's site
  15. 714124.269886
    I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on Bryan W. Roberts's site
  16. 714149.269893
    I describe two candidate representations of a mixture. The first, which I call the standard representation, is not a good representation of a mixture in spite of its widespread popularity. The second, which I call Gibbs’s representation, is less widely adopted but is, I argue, a much better representation. I show that once we have a precise mathematical structure that can be used to represent thermodynamic systems, and once an adequate perspective on representation is adopted, Gibbs’s representation trumps the standard representation.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on Bryan W. Roberts's site
  17. 714186.269901
    This thesis proposes mathematically precise analyses of the concepts of identity and indistinguishability and explores their physical consequences in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I begin by exploring the philosophical consequences of the geometric formulation of thermodynamics, well-known to many mathematicians. Based on this, I offer novel accounts of what it means to be a thermodynamic system and what it means to be a composite system. I then use these mathematical tools to offer new and precise definitions of ‘mixture’ and ‘identity’ in thermodynamics. These analyses allow me to propose a novel resolution of Gibbs’ paradox. Finally, I offer a new definition of indistinguishability in statistical mechanics with a view to offering a new resolution of Gibbs’ paradox in statistical mechanics (the N ! problem). My analysis highlights the importance of observables in the foundations of statistical theories.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on Bryan W. Roberts's site
  18. 714218.269906
    This thesis investigates two kinds of conventionalism in the context of two issues in the philosophy of spacetime: the Einstein Algebra formulation of General Relativity (GR) and the status of simultaneity in special relativity. The outcome of the analysis is that these two cases pull in different directions: I take a step back and analyse the strategy of breaking underdetermination by the invocation of what is often thought of as “non-epistemic” virtues. I argue that certain such virtues are more epistemically relevant than previously thought, in particular where these virtues have to do with the ability of a theory to “point ahead” towards new theories. This conclusion is that the underdetermination between the two formulations of GR only prima facie requires breaking by convention. On the other hand, a careful appraisal of the relativistic limit of Minkowski spacetime leads to the conclusion that relativistic simulaneity is in a precise sense so conventional so as to be devoid of content.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on Bryan W. Roberts's site
  19. 761158.269912
    In this paper, we present an agent-based model for studying the impact of ‘myside bias’ on the argumentative dynamics in scientific communities. Recent insights in cognitive science suggest that scientific reasoning is influenced by ‘myside bias’. This bias manifests as a tendency to prioritize the search and generation of arguments that support one’s views rather than arguments that undermine them. Additionally, individuals tend to apply more critical scrutiny to opposing stances than to their own. Although myside bias may pull individual scientists away from the truth, its effects on communities of reasoners remain unclear. The aim of our model is two-fold: first, to study the argumentative dynamics generated by myside bias, and second, to explore which mechanisms may act as a mitigating factor against its pernicious effects. Our results indicate that biased communities are epistemically less successful than non-biased ones, and that they also tend to be less polarized than non-biased ones. Moreover, we find that two socio-epistemic mechanisms help communities to mitigate the effect of the bias: the presence of a common filter on weak arguments, which can be interpreted as shared beliefs, and an equal distribution of agents for each alternative at the start of the scientific debate.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on PhilSci Archive
  20. 761180.269917
    Apologies serve important moral and social functions such as expressing remorse, taking responsibility, and repairing trusting relationships. LLM-based chatbots routinely produce output which has the linguistic form of an apology. However, chatbots are not the kind of linguistic or moral agents that could perform any of the functions listed above. KEYWORDS: chatbots, apologies, large language models, bullshit Especially since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, there has been a furor about chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Much of the concern has been directed at the problem of hallucination or confabulation, the tendency of chatbots to produce outputs which look like assertions but which have no connection to the truth. It is common to suggest that the output of chatbots is bullshit in the somewhat technical sense defined by Harry Frankfurt. Chatbot outputs which are not declarative sentences have received less attention. Our focus here is on apologies.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on PhilSci Archive
  21. 761210.269923
    Wilfrid Sellars’ distinctive mid-20th century version of scientific realism has lately been gaining ground. There has been growing appreciation of how, by means of his critique of the Myth of the Given, Sellars highlights profound problems in the representationalism (or descriptivism – we treat these terms as equivalent) that mainstream realisms have taken for granted. Representationalism may be broadly understood as the idea that statements count as true exactly insofar as corresponding discrete portions of reality (‘truth-makers’) exist. The problem Sellars saw with representationalist realisms is that although they posit the existence of many entities, they leave unexplained: i) how our language manages to ‘denote’ these entities, when it would appear that linguistic and worldly items are quite unlike one another, ii) how the worldly items (both particulars and general properties) are individuated. With synoptic ambition rare in his era, Sellars set out to extract the tangled hedge of representationalism by its root, and develop a new, properly naturalistic, account of concept-formation in its place.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on PhilSci Archive
  22. 775557.269935
    Fabian Hundertmark, Bielefeld University Jakob Roloff, Justus-Liebig-University Gießen Francesca Bellazzi, University of Oslo, ERC Project Assembling Life (no.101089326) 1. Introduction In the target post, Dong and Piccinini criticize SE and propose a new goal-contribution account of functions (GCA) (also in Maley, Piccinini 2017; Piccinini, 2020). …
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on The Brains Blog
  23. 775557.269944
    Preliminary Note: As usual, the end of the year is hectic, and I’m spending quite some time preparing special content for this newsletter that should be ready for Christmas Eve. Posting should be light until then, and today’s post is more a digression from my usual topics than anything else. …
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on The Archimedean Point
  24. 833525.26995
    Andrew Bailey formulated and defended the Priority Principle (PP), that we think our thoughts in a primary rather than inherited way. His main argument for PP is a two-thinkers argument: if I think my thoughts in an inherited way, then something else—the thing I inherit the thoughts from—thinks them as well, but there aren’t two thinkers of my thoughts. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  25. 855977.269956
    In an old post, I said that Goodman and Quine can’t define the concept of an infinite number of objects using their logical resources. Allen Hazen corrected me in a comment in the specific context of defining infinite sentences. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  26. 869648.269962
    The commentators in this Special Issue on ‘Epistemology, ontology, and scientific realism’ raise substantial questions about, and objections to, central aspects of my own thinking about semirealism (a proposal for how best to formulate scientific realism), as well as the larger philosophical context in which debates about scientific realism unfold. This larger context concerns the nature of realism more generally and the epistemic stances that underlie our considered opinions of what the sciences are telling us about the ontology of the world. In this paper, I consider my critics’ remarks, and endeavor to lay their criticisms to rest.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Anjan Chakravartty's site
  27. 913056.269967
    Comonotonicity (“same variation”) of random variables minimizes hedging possibilities and has been widely used, e.g., in Gilboa and Schmeidler’s ambiguity models. This paper investigates anticomonotonicity (“opposite variation”; abbreviated “AC”), the natural counterpart to comonotonicity. It minimizes leveraging rather than hedging possibilities. Surprisingly, AC restrictions of several traditional axioms do not give new models. Instead, they strengthen the foundations of existing classical models: (a) linear functionals through Cauchy’s equation; (b) Anscombe-Aumann expected utility; (c) as-if-risk-neutral pricing through no-arbitrage; (d) de Finetti’s bookmaking foundation of Bayesianism using subjective probabilities; (e) risk aversion in Savage’s subjective expected utility. In each case, our generalizations show where the critical tests of classical axioms lie: in the AC cases (maximal hedges). We next present examples where AC restrictions do essentially weaken existing axioms, and do provide new properties and new models.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Peter P. Wakker's site
  28. 924834.269973
    In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions—predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc.—intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou, and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this talk, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: (i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; (ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Dan Zeman's site
  29. 928689.269978
    The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato ’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world ’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Henry Farrell's site
  30. 930588.269987
    A sentential connective is said to be univocal, relative to a formal system F for a sentential logic containing iff any two connectives 1 and 2 which satisfy the same F rules (and axioms) as are such that similar formulas involving ⋆ and ⋆2 are inter-derivable in F . To be more precise, suppose is a unary connective. Then is univocal relative to F iff for any 1 and 2 satisfying the same principles as in F, we have 1α ⊢F 2 . And, if is binary, then is univocal relative to F iff for any 1 and 2 satisfying the same principles as in F , we have α ⋆1 ⊢F α ⋆2 . In order to illustrate this definition of univocity, it is helpful to begin with a simple historical example.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Branden Fitelson's site