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476160.057337
The desirable gambles framework provides a foundational approach to imprecise probability theory but relies heavily on linear utility assumptions. This paper introduces function-coherent gambles, a generalization that accommodates non-linear utility while preserving essential rationality properties. We establish core axioms for function-coherence and prove a representation theorem that characterizes acceptable gambles through continuous linear functionals. The framework is then applied to analyze various forms of discounting in intertemporal choice, including hyperbolic, quasi-hyperbolic, scale-dependent, and state-dependent discounting. We demonstrate how these alternatives to constant-rate exponential discounting can be integrated within the function-coherent framework. This unified treatment provides theoretical foundations for modeling sophisticated patterns of time preference within the desirability paradigm, bridging a gap between normative theory and observed behavior in intertemporal decision-making under genuine uncertainty.
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482633.057481
According to the model of exchange as mutual assistance, an exchange can be perceived as a joint activity for mutual benefit – and needn’t involve any self-directed motives at all. This essay pushes back against this new defence of market motives. The essay develops an alternative ideal of production as caring solidarity, in which production is a joint activity of caring about one another. Points of overlap and difference are developed in some detail. The essay concludes by discussing the implications for an economics of caring solidarity, with discussion of the limitations of various market socialist strategies.
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499267.057517
For Karl Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some beliefs in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false; their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests. One can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (that is, the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. I illustrate this analysis with some of Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes and offer an account of Marx’s conception of “interests.”
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531913.057539
Please enjoy Harvard’s Jacob Barandes and yours truly duking it out for 2.5 hours on YouTube about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and specifically Jacob’s recent proposal involving “indivisible stochastic dynamics,” with Curt Jaimungal as moderator. …
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543287.057552
Attachment is deeply important to human life. When one person becomes ‘attached’ to another, their sense of security turns on their emotional, social, and physical engagement with that person. This kind of security-based attachment has been extensively studied in psychology. Yet attachment theory (in the specific sense studied by psychologists) has not received adequate attention in analytic theories of social justice. In this paper, we conceptualize attachment’s nature and value, addressing when and why attachments place justice-based claims on individuals and institutions, in an attempt to establish the centrality of attachment theory to liberal political philosophy. We first characterize security-based attachment and differentiate it from related phenomena (§1). We then explore its value, theorizing the connection between attachment, care, and companionship, drawing on the ethics of care (§2). We explain when and why security-based attachment generates claims of justice within liberal theory, noting some important difficulties (§3). Finally, we sketch some implications in three domains: the rights of those who have suffered pregnancy loss, the rights of grandparents vis-à-vis grandchildren, and the rights of attached friends to social and political recognition (§4).
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544677.057568
How grateful x should be to y for ϕing depends on:
The expected benefit to x
The actual benefit to x
The expected cost to y
The actual deontic status of y’ ϕing
The believed deontic status of y’s ϕing. …
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557236.057598
Although several accounts of scientific understanding exist, the concept of understanding in relation to technology remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a philosophical account of technological understanding—the type of understanding that is required for and reflected by successfully designing and using technological artefacts. We develop this notion by building on the concept of scientific understanding. Drawing on parallels between science and technology, and specifically between scientific theories and technological artefacts, we extend the idea of scientific understanding into the realm of technology. We argue that, just as scientific understanding involves the ability to explain a phenomenon using a theory, technological understanding involves the ability to use a technological artefact to realise a practical aim.
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557261.057615
Physics not only describes past, present, and future events but also accounts for unrealized possibilities. These possibilities are represented through the solution spaces given by theories. These spaces are typically classified into two categories: kinematical and dynamical. The distinction raises important questions about the nature of physical possibility. How should we interpret the difference between kinematical and dynamical models? Do dynamical solutions represent genuine possibilities in the physical world? Should kinematical possibilities be viewed as mere logical or linguistic constructs, devoid of a deeper connection to the structure of physical reality? This chapter addresses these questions by analyzing some of the most significant theories in physics: classical mechanics, general relativity and quantum mechanics, with a final mention to quantum gravity. We argue that only dynamical models correspond to genuine physical possibilities.
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557279.057631
This paper examines cases in which an individual’s misunderstanding improves the scientific community’s understanding via “corrective” processes that produce understanding from poor epistemic inputs. To highlight the unique features of valuable misunderstandings and corrective processes, we contrast them with other social-epistemological phenomena including testimonial understanding, collective understanding, Longino’s critical contextual empiricism, and knowledge from falsehoods.
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557303.057645
I argue that John Norton’s notions of empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibility canbe successfully used to analyze counterintuitive examples of physical possibility and align better with modal intuitions of practicing physicists. First, I clarify the relationship between Norton’s possibility notions and the received view of logical and physical possibility. In particular, I argue that Norton’s empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibility cannot coincide with the received view of physical possibility; instead, the received view of physical possibility is a special case of Norton’s logical possibility. I illustrate my claims using examples from Classical Mechanics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. I then arrive at my conclusions by subsuming Norton’s empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibilities under a single concept of conditional inductive possibility and by Philosophy analyzing the types and degrees of strengths that can be associated with it.
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557323.05766
A critique is given of the attempt by Hettema and Kuipers to formalize the periodic table. In particular I dispute their notions of identifying a naïve periodic table with tables having a constant periodicity of eight elements and their views on the different conceptions of the atom by chemists and physicists. The views of Hettema and Kuipers on the reduction of the periodic system to atomic physics are also considered critically.
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557341.057675
Whereas most scientists are highly critical of constructivism and relativism in the context of scientific knowledge acquisition, the dominant school of chemical education researchers appears to support a variety of such positions. By reference to the views of Herron, Spencer, and Bodner, I claim that these authors are philosophically confused, and that they are presenting a damaging and anti-scientific message to other unsuspecting educators. Part of the problem, as I argue, is a failure to distinguish between pedagogical con - structivism regarding students' understanding of science, and constructivism about the way that scientific knowledge is acquired by expert scientists.
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615048.057689
Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror is a useful introduction to the various moral, social, and political problems raised by arti cial intelligence (AI). There are many things that can be said to be arti cially intelligent. Vallor’s focus is a machine that learns using algorithmic, statistical mathematics to ‘produce novel outputs of the same general kind as their training data (such as images, sounds and sentences)’ (p. 19). This sort of intelligence is analogous to the intelligent ability of humans who, upon provision of limited input information, successfully generalize to unreported cases. For example, in learning colour language, humans need only a few cases for them to generalize successfully about colours in non-identical situations.
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615066.057705
De Haro, S. [2025]: ‘James Read’s Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity’, BJPS Review of Books, 2025, https://doi.org/10.59350/693wk-sqn26 Background-independence has been a much-debated topic in spacetime theories. One of the main lessons of the general theory of relativity is that spacetime is not xed, as in Newton’s theory, but is dynamical. Since the shape of a spacetime depends on its matter content, the relation between geometry and matter is dynamic. Thus there is no privileged spacetime background on which physics is to be done; unlike the cases of Newtonian space and time, and special relativity’s Minkowski spacetime.
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615084.057722
There are two broad approaches to the publication emergency. Revolutionaries advocate abandoning the current system anonymous pre-publication peer review and editing in favour of open access archives and post-publication crowd-sourced peer review (Heesen and Bright [2021]; Copeland and Marin [2024]; Arvan et al. [2025]). Reformers acknowledge the many problems with the current system, but focus their e orts on improving journals: taking them open access, making them non-pro t, or improving their day-to-day administration. Levy’s sympathies seem to be with the reformers. He focuses on problems within the current publication system, including intellectual charity in peer review, how to handle hoaxes, and what attitude writers should take towards the claims they make in print.
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615102.057738
When is C a cause of E? Many traditional approaches to causation imply that the answer to this question must be of the form ‘C is a cause of E if and only if X’, where X is supposed to provide necessary and su cient conditions for C’s being a cause of E, while itself not relying on causal notions. This reductive approach to causation has led to various valuable insights. However, some philosophers have always been sceptical that such an analysis is possible and, especially in the last two decades, the hope that philosophers could eventually agree on a widely accepted reductive theory of causation has faded. Nevertheless, the literature on causation is ourishing, since causal notions are central to both philosophical and scienti c discourse and there is much to be said about them, even beyond attempts to provide a uni ed reductive analysis.
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615123.057755
Here are two statements that are both very plausibly true, but which seem to be in serious tension: (1) In 1879 A. A. Michelson measured the speed of light to within 99% accuracy (2) Strictly speaking, there is no speed of light in Special relativity. The purpose of this paper will be to resolve the tension between (1) and (2). The majority of what follows will be devoted to defending the second claim, which is remarkably controversial even among working physicists and philosophers of science. I argue that this controversy is due to a confusion about the role of co-ordinate representations in characterizing different theories of space-time. Once this confusion is resolved, it becomes clear that the claim that light has a speed at all is nothing more than an artifact of our representational scheme, and not an accurate reflection of the space-time structure of relativity. Before going into all that, I will say a few things in favor of (1).
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615143.057769
The growing interest in the concept of probability of self-location of a conscious agent created multiple controversies. Considering David Albert’s setup in which he described his worries about consistency of the concept, I identify the sources of these controversies and argue that defining “self” in an operational way provides a satisfactory meaning for the probability of self-location of an agent in a quantum world. It keeps the nontrivial feature of having subjective ignorance of self-location without ignorance about the state of the universe. It also allows defining the Born rule in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and proving it from some natural assumptions.
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625660.057782
Last week something world-shaking happened, something that could change the whole trajectory of humanity’s future. No, not that—we’ll get to that later. For now I’m talking about Anthropic’s “Emergent Misalignment” paper. …
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766493.057794
If Moby Dick overflows with boundless energy, the narration in Billy Budd, written at the other end of Melville’s life, is carefully controlled. But neither book can simply tell its tale; both are driven by a need to pause over each moment’s significance, psychological, political, and spiritual. …
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776866.057807
Philosophers of language have tended to treat names merely as tools for talking about individuals, either directly or as part of a denoting phrase. We argue that names are every bit as much tools for tracking, maintaining, and performatively updating our positions in social space, as well as projecting a linguistic persona. This pushes us towards a revised picture of the meanings of names, one which incorporates what we shall call a ‘social sense’.
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788062.057826
In order to understand cognition, we often recruit analogies as building blocks of theories to aid us in this quest. One such attempt, originating in folklore and alchemy, is the homunculus: a miniature human who resides in the skull and performs cognition. Perhaps surprisingly, this appears indistinguishable from the implicit proposal of many neurocognitive theories, including that of the ‘cognitive map,’ which proposes a representational substrate for episodic memories and navigational capacities. In such ‘small cakes’ cases, neurocognitive representations are assumed to be meaningful and about the world, though it is wholly unclear who is reading them, how they are interpreted, and how they come to mean what they do. We analyze the ‘small cakes’ problem in neurocognitive theories (including, but not limited to, the cognitive map) and find that such an approach a) causes infinite regress in the explanatory chain, requiring a human-in-the-loop to resolve, and b) results in a computationally inert account of representation, providing neither a function nor a mechanism. We caution against a ‘small cakes’ theoretical practice across computational cognitive modelling, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, wherein the scientist inserts their (or other humans’) cognition into models because otherwise the models neither perform as advertised, nor mean what they are purported to, without said ‘cake insertion.’ We argue that the solution is to tease apart explanandum and explanans for a given scientific investigation, with an eye towards avoiding van Rooij’s (formal) or Ryle’s (informal) infinite regresses.
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788086.057839
A speculative exploration of the distinction between a relational formal ontology and a classical formal ontology for modelling phenomena in nature that exhibit relationally-mediated wholism, such as phenomena from quantum physics and biosemiotics. Whereas a classical formal ontology is based on mathematical objects and classes, a relational formal ontology is based on mathematical signs and categories. A relational formal ontology involves nodal networks (systems of constrained iterative processes) that are dynamically sustained through signalling. The nodal networks are hierarchically ordered and exhibit characteristics of deep learning. Clarifying the distinction between classical and relational formal ontologies may help to clarify the role of interpretative context in physics (eg. the role of the observer in quantum theory) and the role of hierarchical nodal networks in computational models of learning processes in generative AI.
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788108.057853
Motivational trade-off behaviours, where an organism behaves as if flexibly weighing up an opportunity for reward against a risk of injury, are often regarded as evidence that the organism has valenced experiences like pain. This type of evidence has been influential in shifting opinion regarding crabs and insects. Critics note that (i) the precise links between trade-offs and consciousness are not fully known; (ii) simple trade-offs are evinced by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mediated by a mechanism plausibly too simple to support conscious experience; (iii) pain can sometimes interfere with rather than support making trade-offs rationally. However, rather than undermining trade-off evidence in general, such cases show that the nature of the trade-off, and its underlying neural substrate, matter. We investigate precisely how.
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788125.05787
Recent work on the philosophy of high energy physics experiments has considerably advanced our understanding of their epistemology, for instance concerning measurements by the ATLAS collaboration at the large hadron collider (Beauchemin 2017). In this paper we aim to highlight and analyze complementary low energy ‘tabletop’ experiments in particle (and other kinds of fundamental) physics. In particular, we contrast ATLAS measurements with high precision measurements of the electron magnetic moment. We find, for instance, that the simplicity of the latter experiment allows for uncertainties to be minimized materially, in the very construction of the apparatus. We also suggest that a better appreciation of the capacities of such comparatively ‘frugal’ experiments broadens our conception of ‘cutting edge’ physics, and ultimately helps to inform value judgments about possible research programs in the field.
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788231.057883
Philosophers have become increasingly aware of the difficulties that plague accounts of kinds with objectively determined boundaries, and generally recognise that scientific taxonomies are shaped by human pragmatic interests and non-epistemic values. Against this trend, we propose an account of kinds conceived as dynamic entities, characterised by qualitatively distinct and robust trajectories originating from bifurcation events in the development of complex systems. We argue that the Homeorhetic Dynamic Kinds account (HDK) can be applied to systems investigated in a variety of disciplinary contexts, ranging from biology, medicine, and the social sciences. Shifting the focus from a synchronic (homeostatic) to a dynamic and processual (homeorhetic) perspective, we show that HDK allows a better characterisation of discontinuities among kinds. We then outline its implications for pluralism, particularly how HDK can help us to understand how scientific categories are shaped both by ontological aspects of developmental trajectories and by pragmatic, value-laden considerations.
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808977.0579
Here, I discuss the national debt: Will it doom all of us? What can be done about it? 1. Background
Nearly every year, the U.S. government spends more money than it collects in taxes. There were 4 years (1998-2001) during which we had surpluses; apart from that, we’ve had big shortfalls for the last 50 years. …
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842688.057913
There is a genre of moral philosophy for which I have particular affection, in which a thinker subjects an aspect of ordinary life to rigorous scrutiny, revealing it to be more puzzling or more profound that is typically acknowledged. …
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900077.057926
Years ago, in ‘Expected Value without Expecting Value’, I noted that “The vast majority of students would prefer to save 1000 lives for sure, than to have a 10% chance of saving a million lives. This, even though the latter choice has 100 times the expected value.”
Joe Carlsmith’s essay on Expected Utility Maximization nicely explains “Why it’s OK to predictably lose” in this sort of situation. …
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944840.057939
In two interdependent dissertations published in 1611 and 1621, the Swedish theologian and bishop Johannes Rudbeckius (1581–1646) takes up the question of whether the world is eternal. He formulates a number of alternative philosophical arguments in order to justify a negative answer. Without noticing this, he employs two mutually independent notions of eternity. I comment on five of Rudbeckius’s arguments from a systematic point of view. The arguments make use of explicit reasoning about infinite cardinalities, including the use of explicit assumptions regarding arithmetic operations applied to infinite quantities. It is observed that each argument has its origin in medieval scholastic philosophy or is adapted from texts written by Roman authors. The affinity of Rudbeckius’s approach to the scholastic tradition gets highlighted: he is convinced that reason and revelation are not mutually exclusive sources of knowledge: certain theologically relevant propositions can even be proven by philosophical arguments.