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396261.490573
This article provides an epistemological assessment of climate analogue methods, with specific reference to the use of spatial analogues in the study of the future climate of target locations. Our contention is that, due to formal and conceptual inadequacies of geometrical dissimilarity metrics and the loss of relevant information, especially when reasoning from the physical to the socio-economical level, purported inferences from climate analogues of the spatial kind we consider here prove limited in a number of ways. Indeed, we formulate five outstanding problems concerning the search for best analogues, which we call the problem of non-uniqueness of the source, problem of non-uniqueness of the target, problem of average, problem of non-causal correlations and problem of inferred properties, respectively. In the face of such problems, we then offer two positive recommendations for a fruitful application of this methodology to the assessment of impact, adaptation and vulnerability studies of climate change, especially in the context of what we may prosaically dub “twin cities”. Arguably, such recommendations help decision-makers constrain the set of plausible climate analogues by integrating local knowledge relevant to the locations of interest.
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396291.490779
Interpretation plays a central role in using scientific models to explain natural phenomena: Meaning must be bestowed upon a model in terms of what it is and what it represents to be used for model explanations. However, it remains unclear how capacious and complex interpretation in models can be, particularly when conducted by the same group of scientists in the context of one explanatory project. This paper sheds light upon this question by examining modelling and explanatory practices related to the Olami-Feder-Christensen model of earthquakes. This case study shows that various interpretations are intricately connected in the overall meaning of a model used for model explanations. This leads to a manifold picture of interpretation, according to which scientific models are construed as networks of interconnected meanings. As scientists ponder and integrate these various interpretations, guided by locally attended epistemic interests, they achieve model explanations with layers of content, both in their explanantia and explananda.
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396323.490821
The prospective formalization of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) has been intensely debated. This paper explores and assesses the stakes of this process from a philosophical perspective. I distinguish two senses of formalization – the descriptive and the evaluative – and argue that: i) there are descriptive and evaluative formalizations of the Anthropocene beyond the confines of the ICS; ii) incoherencies between Anthropocene proposals and the ICS’s current tenets are not a decisive reason for deferring descriptive formalization; and iii) the prospective evaluative formalization of the Anthropocene by the ICS would be impactful.
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396353.490845
Despite a growing effort in recent years to theorize epistemic justice as a species of distributive justice from within a Rawlsian framework, there is as yet no well-worked out capabilities-based account. In this paper, we set out to provide one. According to our sufficientarian conception, epistemic justice requires a distribution of capabilities that ensures to all individuals opportunities for minimal epistemic agency, publicly conceived. We argue that this conception has advantages over existing resourcist accounts of distributive epistemic justice inspired by Rawls as well as over Miranda Fricker’s tentative capabilities-based alternative. We contend that epistemic justice concerns a plurality of capabilities for epistemic agency, where the scope and nature of these capabilities is ultimately left open to discernment through public reasoning, but where equal emphasis is placed on contributing as well as retrieving epistemic goods and resources from common pools and on exerting combined capabilities as well as developing internal ones in the first place.
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498305.490905
An author can ask for no greater gift than excellent challenges and criticisms from colleagues who are deeply engaged in the same topics. I am extremely grateful to have the opportunity to think through the reactions and critiques posed by these contributions. While I cannot provide a full response to each critic I will focus on some of the central questions that underlie their criticisms. I shall address these central questions in the order in which they show up in the book.
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498345.490926
In this essay I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as ‘embodiment’ and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in deliberative minipublics; defend the democratic attractiveness of participatory uses over empowered uses of deliberative minipublics; clarify why accepting public reason constraints does not imply limiting deliberation to questions about constitutional rights; and argue that overcoming a state-centric conception of democracy does not require replacing the ‘all subjected’ principle with the ‘all affected’ principle.
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556525.490948
Intuitively, collective nouns are pseudo-singular: a collection of things (a pair of people, a flock of birds, etc.) just is the things that make ‘it’ up. But certain facts about natural language seem to count against this view. In short, distributive predicates and numerals interact with collective nouns in ways that they seemingly shouldn’t if those nouns are pseudo-singular. We call this set of issues ‘the distribution problem’. To solve it, we propose a modification to cover-based semantics. On this semantics, the interpretation of distributive predicates and numerals depends on a cover, where the choice of cover is strongly semantically constrained by the noun with which they interact.
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557333.49097
For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical work being carried out at the moment that addresses the novel aspects of online communication. The topics range from the expressive functions of emoji to the oppressive powers of search engines.
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569406.491
Del Santo and Gisin have recently argued that classical mechanics exhibits a form of indeterminacy and that by treating the observables of classical mechanics with real number precision we introduce hidden variables that restore determinacy. In this article we introduce the conceptual machinery required to critically evaluate these claims. We present a characterization of indeterminacy which can capture both quantum indeterminacy and the classical indeterminacy of Del Santo and Gisin. This allows us to show that there is an important difference in kind between the two: their classical indeterminacy can be resolved with hidden variables in a manner which is not possible for quantum indeterminacy.
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569433.491048
The self-declared focus of Gordon Belot’s new book, Accelerating Expansion: Philosophy and Physics with a Positive Cosmological Constant, is de Sitter spacetime. Belot discusses its mathematical structure, the central role which it plays in contemporary relativistic cosmology, and—perhaps most importantly for the readers of this journal—the philosophical and conceptual puzzles that arise from taking this central role seriously. The book aims to be a graduate-student-friendly invitation to all things de Sitter, and the main text is accompanied by mathematical exercises and more philosophically-oriented open questions.
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569460.491074
In a widely cited study in this Journal, Nick Bostrom has posed the Vulnerable World Hypothesis: technological development, if occuring under conditions similar to those in the present, will make the devastation of civilization likely. In light of such drastic consequences, the hypothesis is worth seriously discussing in both bredth and depth. Two related proposals are hereby made and justified: creating a metatechnological map (or “tech tree”) capable of telling in advance where exactly the dangerous technologies are, and reducing the size of the apocalyptic residual by antitotalitarian deradicalization and deprogramming. Both are modest proposals in the sense that they imply neither deep restructuring of human nature nor building instruments for potential totalitarian violations of civil rights and liberties.
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593776.491096
This first excerpt for November is really just the preface to 3.1. Remember, our abbreviated cruise this fall is based on my LSE Seminars in 2020, and since there are only 5, I had to cut. So those seminars skipped 3.1 on the eclipse tests of GTR. …
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593886.491123
If a book is evaluated by the caliber of its critics, then Appearance & Explanation (A&E) is a smashing success. We could not have asked for better critics to discuss our book for this symposium. Each raises numerous issues that are worthy of careful consideration and extended discussion. Unfortunately, due to the limited word count with which we are working, we cannot hope to address them all. We can only offer brief replies to the objections to Phenomenal Explanationism (PE) that we do discuss, and must forgo responding to criticism of our objections to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC). We hope what we say is enough to indicate the ways in which we think PE can be defended. In what follows, we provide responses to each critic in alphabetical order. We would like to thank all the contributors for taking the time to read A&E so carefully and for writing such engaging critiques. We are especially grateful to Matthias Steup for all of his work organizing this symposium.
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614307.491144
How do plurals and mass nouns refer? What kind of logic should be used in order to account for the truth-conditions of the sentences they appear in? For linguists, first-order predicate logic is adequate, provided it is supplemented by a notion of mereological sum for plurals and for mass nouns. On the contrary, according to some philosophers, new logics must be used, plural logic for plurals and mass logic for mass nouns. We survey these debates in this entry.
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620255.491166
Today I’d like to dig a little deeper into some ideas from Part 2. I’ve been talking about causal loop diagrams. Very roughly speaking, a causal loop diagram is a graph with labeled edges. I showed how to ‘pull back’ and ‘push forward’ these labels along maps of graphs. …
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627105.491187
This article proposes an empirical approach to understanding the life of an organism that overcomes reductionist and dualist approaches. The approach is based on Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the cognitive conditions required for the recognition of an organism: the concept of teleology and the assumption of a formative power of self-generation. It is analyzed how these two criteria are applied in the cognition of a developing organism. Using the example of a developmental series of a plant leaf, an active and relational process between observer and developing organism is shown, within which the teleology and self-generating power of the organism can be empirically observed through the mental faculties of understanding and will. Furthermore, it is emphasized that, according to Kant, even physical objects are not readily given, but are actively constituted through the unification of sense perceptions with concepts. This Kantian mode of objectification facilitates cognition of the physical properties of an organism. It can be supplemented with a participatory and co-constitutive mode of realization, in which the life of the organism (its teleologically organizing and self-generating power) can become an object of empirical research. Furthermore, it is argued that the participatory mode also facilitates an expanded conception of nature that allows for the existence of living beings within it. Finally, an analogy to Goethe’s approach to the living organism is highlighted. In summary, it is stated that to understand life, one must consciously participate in it.
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627131.49121
I present a case-study of intra-scientific communication, focusing on the role of technical typists for the Physical Review (PR) c. 1957-1977. I argue PR became a trading zone amidst the page-charge crisis, and analyze the working networks of physicists, typists, and editors to resolve this threat to the equality of intellectual authority of qualified practitioners. Challenging the picture of typist as “automaton,” I identify the skills and technical knowledge necessary to perform manuscript translation, and offer an account of the material culture of intra-scientific communication to situate the typists’ epistemic role in the broader project of science. I claim this is a case of an epistemic contribution that has been instrumentalized, akin to human computers and human scanners. However, unlike these cases, the technical typists were not directly involved in the production or critique of scientific data. Rather their novel contributions occurred in the new field of mathematical typesetting that emerged from this trading zone. Thus I seek to differentiate the material culture of scientific experiments from the material culture of intra-scientific communication. I see this project as an extension of Galison’s trading zone framework for the material culture of experiment, recognizing that there are many more material objects besides those of the laboratory that are created in the scientific process.
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627159.491237
In this paper, I explore the relation between actual scientific practice and conceptual interpretation of scientific theories by investigating the particle concept in non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM). On the one hand, philosophers have raised various objections against the particle concept within the context of NRQM and proposed alternative ontologies such as wave function realism, Bohmian particles, mass density field, and flashes based on different realist solutions to the measurement problem. On the other hand, scientists continue to communicate, reason, and explain experimental phenomena using particle terms in the relevant regimes. It has been explicitly argued and, for most of the time, implicitly assumed in the philosophical literature that we do not need to take scientists’ particle talk seriously, and recovering position measurement of particles in our ontological accounts is sufficient to make contact with scientific practice. In this paper, I argue that although scientific discourse does not postulate a uniform and coherent ontology, it nevertheless postulates real properties. Our ontological accounts thus need to recover the various properties associated with the NRQM particle concept in scientific discourse. I show that recovering these particle properties is not trivially achievable by pointing out some particular challenges these revisionary ontologies face in the process.
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627187.491259
A growing body of psychological research suggests that different kinds of explanations of mental illness can have striking and distinctive effects on their audiences’ attitudes and inferences. But it is surprisingly difficult to account for why this is. In this paper, I present a “normative model” of explanatory framing effects, which I claim does a better job of capturing the empirical data than do intuitive alternatives. On this model, different explanations will tend to differently affect their audience’s reasoning because each encodes a different picture of the kind of problem represented by the explanandum, and therefore the kinds of responses to it that are normatively apt to pursue. For example, a biological explanation of depression will convey to its audience that depression is a specifically biological problem, and therefore that appropriate responses to it should be directed at biological facts and norms. The communication of this normative information is, I argue, importantly different from communicating that depression has biological causes. For example, although it seems plausible that most causal explanations can be viewed additively, different characterizations of a problem cannot be so easily combined. This might explain why philosophers and mental health experts sometimes seem to regard different explanations of mental illness as competing or mutually incompatible, despite their appreciation for the causal complexity of these conditions.
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627214.491291
On the hierarchical picture of models, theoretical models are constructed on the basis of theory and assessed by comparison to distinct models constructed from empirical data. Using the determination of the structure of the folded polypeptide chain as a case study, I instead argue that information from theory and data alike can be interpreted as constraints in the construction of models of information. On this view, more reliable information ought to be prioritized, sometimes forcing reinterpretations of less reliable information; information from theory and data is thus interdependent. I show how the reliability of information can be assessed, arguing that the evidence for a planar peptide bond was stronger and more secure than the evidence for a repeating subunit every 5.1 Å, and that disciplinary origin in physics or biology is immaterial to assessing reliability. I further show how models are assessed alongside interpretations of information in a coherentist manner: a better model accommodates more information, particularly reliable information; a model’s inability to accommodate some information necessitates reinterpreting that information.
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627247.49132
In this paper, I argue that the constrains operating in some cases of so-called mathematical explanations of physical phenomena (MEPPs) are not strictly speaking mathematical. For this reason, the existence of explanations by constraint in science does not justify mathematical realism, not even in its Aristotelian version. I illustrate this with the now-classic case of the Bridges of Königsberg, as well as the case of the carbon molecules known as buckyballs (buckminsterfullerene).
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664220.491343
Bisimulations are standard in modal logic and, more generally, in the theory of state-transition systems. The quotient structure of a Kripke model with respect to the bisimulation relation is called a bisimulation contraction. The bisimulation contraction is a minimal model bisimilar to the original model, and hence, for (image-)finite models, a minimal model modally equivalent to the original. Similar definitions exist for bounded bisimulations (k-bisimulations) and bounded bisimulation contractions. Two finite models are k-bisimilar if and only if they are modally equivalent up to modal depth k. However, the quotient structure with respect to the k-bisimulation relation does not guarantee a minimal model preserving modal equivalence to depth k. In this paper, we remedy this asymmetry to standard bisimulations and provide a novel definition of bounded contractions called rooted k-contractions. We prove that rooted k-contractions preserve k-bisimilarity and are minimal with this property. Finally, we show that rooted k-contractions can be exponentially more succinct than standard k-contractions.
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677813.491363
The French newspaper Le Monde published an interesting article (in French) a few days ago about the problems caused by the rising number of so-called “fatbikes” circulating on the Parisian bike lanes. …
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707914.491386
Philanthropy involves the voluntary contribution of money or other
goods and resources for broadly public purposes. Unlike taxation,
contributions are not coerced: rather, their magnitude, their
direction, and often their specific use is determined by the
donor’s discretion. Unlike the case of ordinary market exchange,
the giver does not ask or receive payment for what she offers, though
she may receive psychological, reputational, or even material benefits
from her gift (e.g., she may feel a “warm glow”, see her
name above a building or on a wall honoring donors, receive perks from
the organizations she supports, or enjoy tax benefits).
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719779.491412
The idea of complementarity is one of the key concepts of quantum mechanics. Yet, the idea was originally developed in William James’ psychology of consciousness. Recently, it was re-applied to the humanities and forms one of the pillars of modern quantum cognition. I will explain two different concepts of complementarity: Niels Bohr’s ontic conception, and Werner Heisenberg’s epistemic conception. Furthermore, I will give an independent motivation of the epistemic conception based on the so-called operational interpretation of quantum theory, which has powerfully been applied in the domain of quantum cognition. Finally, I will give examples illustrating the potency of complementarity in the domains of bounded rationality and survey research. Concerning the broad topic of consciousness, I will focus on the psychological aspects of awareness. This closes the circle spanning complementarity, quantum cognition, the operational interpretation, and consciousness.
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739544.491435
Truthmaker semantics is a non-classical logical framework that has recently garnered significant interest in philosophy, logic, and natural language semantics. It redefines the propositional connectives and gives rise to more fine-grained entailment relations than classical logic. In its model theory, truth is not determined with respect to possible worlds, but with respect to truthmakers, such as states or events. Unlike possible worlds, these truthmakers may be partial; they may be either coherent or incoherent; and they are understood to be exactly or wholly relevant to the truth of the sentences they verify. Truth-maker semantics generalizes collective, fusion-based theories of conjunction; alternative-based theories of disjunction; and nonstandard negation semantics. This article provides a gentle introduction to truthmaker semantics aimed at linguists; describes applications to various natural language phenomena such as imperatives, ignorance implicatures, and negative events; and discusses its similarities and differences to related frameworks such as event semantics, situation semantics, alternative semantics, and inquisitive semantics.
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742616.491457
Scientific theories often allow multiple formulations, e.g., classical mechanics allows Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations. While we count them as equally true, it has been suggested that one formulation can still be more metaphysically perspicuous than another. This paper provides a new account of metaphysical perspicuity, offering both descriptive and revisionary components: As a descriptive component, we examine how metaphysical perspicuity has been conceptualized in the literature. As a revisionary component, we challenge the conventional conception that associates metaphysical perspicuity with other neighboring notions. Thus, we argue that metaphysical perspicuity is a sui generis notion, worth adding to philosophers’ toolbox.
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742647.49148
It is a widely-held belief that (the values of) physical quantities are part of a theory’s ideology. For example, it seems that special relativity has an ontology of spacetime points and particles, and an ideology of mass and charge properties. But these intuitions cannot be reconciled with the logical structure of physical theories. From the mathematical details of a theory such as special relativity, it turns out that mass and charge properties exist in quite the same way that particles exist: the theory quantifies over them. However, there is a different distinction in physics that can carry the same load, namely that between internal and external quantities. Roughly, the internal quantities depend on the external ones; external quantities instantiate internal ones. In contemporary physics, the values of physical quantities are internal. In this sense, the latter distinction supersedes the former. But ideology has not become irrevelant: we can identify it with the structure of a theory’s (external and internal) spaces. Although we can not read off a theory’s ideology from the formalism in the same way that we can read off its ontology, we can use symmetries to discover this structure.
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742677.491501
In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the ‘physics of principles’ that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the ‘physics of models.’ In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a similar role as the energy principle in previous physics. The paper argues that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation of relativity. Unlike the individual physical laws, these principles do not pretend to provide models of any specific physical system, but they do impose constraints on the law-like statements that describe them. The latter do not qualify as proper laws unless they satisfy such constraints. Cassirer pointed out that before and after Kant, the history of physics presents significant instances in which the search for formal conditions that the laws of nature must satisfy preceded and made possible the direct search for such laws. In his earlier years, Cassirer seems to have regarded principles like the energy principle, the relativity principle, the principle of least action, etc., as a constitutive but provisional form of a priori, imposing specific limitations on the form of the allowable laws of nature. Only in his later years, by attributing an autonomous status to these statements of principle, did Cassirer attribute a definitive but merely regulative meaning to the a priori. This does not impose specific requirements on natural laws but only a motivation to search for them.
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742709.491523
Economic approaches to science underline the social structure of science as the chief explanatory factor in its collective epistemic success, and typically endorse a common conclusion, namely that individual virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for science to be successful. We analyze a central example, the invisible hand argument, in reference to a case of collective epistemic failure, namely the credibility crisis. While divergent motivations might also serve the collective goals of science, our analysis shows that the presence of a significant proportion of virtuous scientists in a scientific community is a necessary condition for its success.