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413070.431726
Adrian Bardon has produced a new version of his historical introduction to the philosophy of time. Originally published in 2013, the second edition of 2024 is partly rewritten and supplemented with a more extensive discussion on our disposition to project the passage of time. The historical exposition contains standard figures in Western philosophy, covering antiquity, the early modern era, and the 20th century. This edition also references some schools and figures not typically included in the canon, such as very early Indian sources, Émilie du Châtelet and al-Ghazali. Although the book’s title emphasizes history, most of the chapters are directed at issues in systematic philosophy of time: the realism/antirealism debate, temporal passage, temporal experience, spacetime, direction, time travel, time and free will, and the temporal boundaries of the universe. The book is pedagogically well-designed. The chosen topics are well-balanced and the text flows smoothly from beginning to end. The perennial questions about time are presented to the reader in an accessible way.
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413093.431838
In the 1960s, the demonstration of interference effects using two laser-beams raised the question: can two photons interfere? Its plausibility contested Dirac’s dictum, “Interference between two different photons never occurs”. Disagreements about this conflict led to a controversy. This paper will chart the controversy’s contour and show that it evolved over two phases. Subsequently, I investigate the reasons for its perpetuation. The controversy was initiated and fuelled by several misinterpretations of the dictum. I also argue that Dirac’s dictum is not applicable to two photon interference as they belong to different contexts of interference. Recognising this resolves the controversy.
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415812.431863
If morality and self-interest don’t always coincide—if
sometimes doing what’s right isn’t also best for
you—morality can sometimes require you to do what will be worse
for you or to forgo an act that would benefit you. But some
philosophers think a reasonable morality can’t be too demanding
in this sense and have proposed moral views that are less so.
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435497.431881
The famous Epicurean argument that death (considered as leading to nonexistence) is not a harm is that death doesn’t harm one when one is alive and it doesn’t harm one when one is dead, since the nonexistent cannot be harmed. …
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460395.431898
June 27, 2024 abstract. Causal decision theorists are vulnerable to a money pump if they update by conditioning when they learn what they have chosen. Nevertheless, causal decision theorists are immune to money pumps if they instead update by imaging on their choices and by conditioning on other things (and, in addition, evaluate plans rather choices). I also show that David Lewis’s Dutch-book argument for conditioning does not work when you update on your choices. Even so, a collective of causal decision theorists are still exploitable even if they start off with the same preferences and the same credences and will all see the same evidence. Evidential decision theorists who consistently update by conditioning are not exploitable in this way.
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466318.431913
Albert Einstein, reported by Ernst Strauss understanding of determinism, its embodiments in concrete physical theories, and its relevance to long-standing issues in philosophy. Moreover, we have seen a growing interest in super-determinism. In contrast, strong determinism has received little attention. In this paper, I want to examine what it is and how it impacts some of the central issues in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Strong determinism, according to Penrose [1989], is “not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the universe is fixed, according to some precise mathematical scheme, for all time” (emphasis original, p. 432). This definition, I argue, risks trivializing the distinction between determinism and strong determinism. My first task is to define strong determinism in terms of fundamental laws: a strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that, according to its fundamental laws, permits exactly one nomologically possible world; our world is strongly deterministic just in case it is the only nomologically possible world. Importantly, we expect fundamental laws to be simple, which partly explains why strong determinism is difficult to achieve.
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466348.431928
from our empathy for the dead. Much needs to be done to give a satisfying defense of this proposal — beginning with a defense of the suggestion that empathy can extend, beyond the living, to those who experience nothing. But the very suggestion that empathy plays even some role in grief may itself come as a surprise. In fact, the suggestion goes against the grain of much recent theorizing in philosophical discussions of grief. One of the major divides in this literature is between “agent-centered” views of grief, which claim that the loss to be grieved is a loss from the perspective of the bereaved person’s life, and “object-centered” views, which claim that the loss to be grieved is an objective loss of life, not, primarily, a loss to the griever. Empathy disappears from view in this setting because it straddles the divide between self (the grieving agent) and other (the objective loss); in empathizing, it is said that one feels for another.
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466374.431943
Despite persistent misunderstandings to the contrary, standpoint theorists are not committed to an automatic privilege thesis (Wylie 2003, 27). According to an automatic privilege thesis, those who occupy marginalized social positions automatically know more, or know better, by virtue of their social location. The issues with this thesis are obvious: it is implausible; it offers no explanation of the connection between marginalized social location and epistemic advantage; and it cannot explain how it is that some marginalized individuals seem to (genuinely) buy into oppressive ideologies.
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466401.431958
Thoughts are like Pancakes, and the Brain is the Pan wherein they are tossed and turned by the several Objects, as several Hands.
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528397.431973
I consider the classical (i.e., non-relativistic) limit of Teleparallel Gravity, a relativistic theory of gravity that is empirically equivalent to General Relativity and features torsional forces. I show that as the speed of light is allowed to become infinite, Teleparallel Gravity reduces to Newtonian Gravity without torsion. I compare these results to the torsion-free context and discuss their implications on the purported underdetermination between Teleparallel Gravity and General Relativity. I conclude by considering alternative approaches to the classical limit developed in the literature.
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528438.431988
The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety evaluations aims to test AI behavior for problematic capabilities like deception. However, some scientists have cautioned against the use of behavior to infer general cognitive abilities because of the human tendency to overattribute cognition to everything. They recommend the adoption of a heuristic to avoid these errors that states behavior provides no evidence for cognitive capabilities unless there is some theoretical feature present to justify that inference.
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528469.432003
Recent experimental advances suggest we may soon be able to probe the gravitational field of a mass in a coherent superposition of position states—a system which is widely believed to lie outside the scope of classical and semiclassical gravity. The recent theoretical literature has applied the idea of quantum reference frames (QRFs), originally introduced for non-gravitational contexts, to such a scenario.
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528591.432024
We define a notion of inaccessibility of a decision between two options represented by utility functions, where the decision is based on the order of the expected values of the two utility functions. The inaccessibility expresses that the decision cannot be obtained if the expectation values of the utility functions are calculated using the conditional probability defined by a prior and by partial evidence about the probability that determines the decision. Examples of inaccessible decisions are given in finite probability spaces. Open questions and conjectures about inaccessibility of decisions are formulated. The results are interpreted as showing the crucial role of priors in Bayesian taming of epistemic uncertainties about probabilities that determine decisions based on utility maximizing.
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528624.43204
Philosophers of science commonly connect ontology and science, stating that these disciplines maintain a two-way relationship: on the one hand, we can extract ontology from scientific theories; on the other hand, ontology provides the realistic content of our scientific theories. In this article, we will critically examine the process of naturalizing ontology, i.e., confining the work of ontologists merely to the task of pointing out which entities certain theories commit themselves to. We will use non-relativistic quantum mechanics as a case study. We begin by distinguishing two roles for ontology: the first would be characterized by cataloging existing entities according to quantum mechanics; the second would be characterized by establishing more general ontological categories in which existing entities must be classified. We argue that only the first step is available for a naturalistic approach; the second step not being open for determination or anchoring in science. Finally, we also argue that metaphysics is still a step beyond ontology, not contained in either of the two tasks of ontology, being thus even farther from science. Keywords: ontology, ontological naturalism, quantum mechanics, metaontology.
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528649.432054
Postgraduate research training in the United Kingdom often narrowly focuses on domain-specific methods, neglecting wider philosophical topics such as epistemology and scientific method. Consequently, we designed a workshop on (inductive, deductive, and abductive) inference for postgraduate researchers. We ran the workshop three times with (N = 29) attendees from across four universities, testing the potential benefits of the workshop in a mixed-method, repeated measures design. Our core aims were to investigate what attendees learned from the workshop, and whether they felt it had impacted on their research practices six months later. Overall, learning inferential logic benefitted postgraduate researchers in various ways and to varying degrees. Six months on, roughly half of attendees reported being more critical of key aspects of research such as inferences and study design. Additionally, some attendees reported more subtle effects, such as prompting new lines of thought and inquiry. Given that self-criticism and scepticism are fundamental intellectual virtues, these results evidence the importance of embedding epistemological training into doctoral programmes across the UK.
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531147.432074
Humean accounts of physical laws seem to have an advantage when it comes to explaining our epistemic access to the laws: if the laws are nothing over and above the Humean mosaic, it's no big mystery how observing the mosaic can provide information about the laws. …
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536644.432088
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Accusing your opponents of hypocrisy is one of the most effective rhetorical tactics known to man. But does the fact that your opponents are hypocrites provide substantive evidence against the correctness of their views? …
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583101.432102
Department of Statistical Sciences “Paolo Fortunati”
University of Bologna
[An earlier post by C. Hennig on this topic: Jan 9, 2022: The ASA controversy on P-values as an illustration of the difficulty of statistics]
Statistical tests in five random research papers of 2024, and related thoughts on the “don’t say significant” initiative
This text follows an invitation to write on “abandon statistical significance 5 years on”, so I decided to do a tiny bit of empirical research. …
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586324.432133
An aesthetic sense—a taste for the creation and/or appreciation of that which strikes one as, e.g., attractive or awesome—is often assumed to be a distinctively H. sapiens phenomenon. However, recent paleoanthropological research is revealing its archaeologically visible, deeper roots. The sensorimotor/perceptual and cognitive capacities underpinning aesthetic activities are a major focus of evolutionary aesthetics. Here we take a diachronic, evolutionary perspective and assess ongoing scepticism regarding whether, and to what extent, aesthetic capacity extends to our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it serves as a defence of the attribution of Neanderthal aesthetic capacity by marshalling archaeological data best explained by positing a Neanderthal aesthetic sense. Second, it offers an opportunity to make progress on understanding some epistemically relevant features of the wider debate in evolutionary aesthetics.
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624284.432148
Alice and Bob are both bad people, and both believe in magic. Bob believes that he lives in an infinite universe, with infinitely many sentient beings. Alice thinks all the life there is is life on earth. …
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624284.432163
Carl is an inventor and Davita works for a competing company. They are stuck on a deserted island for a week. Carl informs Davita about something he has just invented. Davita is perfectly honest and if questioned in a court of law will testify to what Carl said. …
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625342.432178
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is said to pose many risks, be they catastrophic, existential and otherwise. This paper discusses whether the notion of risk can apply to AGI, both descriptively and in the current regulatory framework. The paper argues that current definitions of risk are ill-suited to capture supposed AGI existential risks, and that the risk-based framework of the EU AI Act is inadequate to deal with truly general, agential systems.
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632370.432201
In quantum field theory, Hamiltonians contain particle creation and annihilation terms that are usually ultraviolet (UV) divergent. It is well known that these divergences can sometimes be removed by adding counter-terms and by taking limits in which a UV cutoff tends toward infinity. Here, I review a novel way of removing UV divergences: by imposing a type of boundary condition on the wave function. These conditions, called interior-boundary conditions (IBCs), relate the values of the wave function at two configurations linked by the creation or annihilation of a particle. They allow for a direct definition of the Hamiltonian without renormalization or limiting procedures. In the last section, I review another boundary condition that serves to determine the probability distribution of detection times and places on a time-like 3-surface.
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638395.432233
We report on the mechanization of (preference-based) conditional normative reasoning. Our focus is on ˚Aqvist’s system E for conditional obligation, and its extensions. Our mechanization is achieved via a shallow semantical embedding in Isabelle/HOL. We consider two possible uses of the framework. The first one is as a tool for meta-reasoning about the considered logic. We employ it for the automated verification of deontic correspondences (broadly conceived) and related matters, analogous to what has been previously achieved for the modal logic cube. The equivalence is automatically verified in one direction, leading from the property to the axiom. The second use is as a tool for assessing ethical arguments. We provide a computer encoding of a well-known paradox (or impossibility theorem) in population ethics, Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. While some have proposed overcoming the impossibility theorem by abandoning the presupposed transitivity of “better than,” our formalisation unveils a less extreme approach, suggesting among other things the option of weakening transitivity suitably rather than discarding it entirely. Whether the presented encoding increases or decreases the attractiveness and persuasiveness of the repugnant conclusion is a question we would like to pass on to philosophy and ethics.
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649231.432261
On the occasion of the 7th International Conference on Economic Philosophy that we organized last month in Reims, we had two book sessions on recently published books dealing with the main topic of the conference, “market(s) and democracy.” One of the sessions was about Petr Špecián’s (Charles University) Behavioral Political Economy and Democratic Theory (Routledge, 2022) and the other discussed Lisa Herzog’s (University of Groningen) Citizen Knowledge. …
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655654.43229
Episodic memory gives us the ability to mentally travel back in time to revisit and relive past experiences. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the function of episodic memory. According to the orthodox view, episodic memory should be considered a part of a constructive system that simulates the future for sophisticated foresight and flexible planning. In this paper, I offer a novel alternative view. I argue that episodic memory provides invaluable information about the past behavior of others, allowing us to identify reliable and trustworthy partners while avoiding dealing with cheaters. Theoretical models demonstrate that cooperation in groups can be maintained if potential partners use information about an individual’s past behavior to guide their behavior toward that individual. In these reputation-based models of human cooperation, individuals with a history of cheating are ostracized, whereas those with a history of cooperative behavior flourish. Against this theoretical background, it is possible to see a function of episodic memory in facilitating information exchange about others, helping group members make effective partner choices, and avoiding the risk of interacting with cheaters. If correct, episodic memory may have played a significant role in the evolution of human cooperation.
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672553.432305
Kennedy (Linguist Philos 30:1–45, 2007) forcefully proposes what is now a widely assumed semantics for absolute gradable adjectives. On this semantics, maximum standard adjectives like “straight” and “dry” ascribe a maximal degree of the underlying quantity. Meanwhile, minimum standard adjectives like “bent” and “wet” merely ascribe a non-zero, non-minimal degree of the underlying quantity. This theory clashes with the ordinary intuition that sentences like “The stick is straight” are frequently true while sentences like “The stick is bent” are frequently informative, and fans of the indicated theory of absolute gradable adjectives appeal to loose talk in response. One goal of this paper is to show that all extant theories of loose talk are inconsistent with this response strategy. Another goal is to offer a revised version of Hoek’s (Philos Rev 127:151–196, 2018, in: Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, 2019) recent theory of loose talk that accommodates absolute gradable adjectives after all, while being defensible against a range of important concerns.
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679831.43232
Vices are often attributed to corporations. We hear that casinos are ‘greedy,’ mining companies are ‘ruthless,’ or tobacco companies are ‘dishonest.’ This chapter addresses two questions. First, are such corporate vices reducible to the vices of individual role-bearers? Second, which traits of corporations are properly labelled ‘vices’? The chapter argues that corporate vice is sometimes irreducible to the vices of role-bearers: corporations can be vicious ‘over and above’ the traits of role-bearers. It further argues that different corporations should be held to different standards: what it means for a casino to be ‘vicious’ is different from what it means for a mining company to be ‘vicious,’ for example.
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701659.432334
This paper integrates type functionalism with the Kairetic account to develop context-specific models for explaining mental states, particularly pain, across different species and systems. By employing context-dependent mapping fc, we ensure cohesive causal explanations while accommodating multiple realizations of mental states. The framework identifies context subsets Ci and maps them to similarity subspaces Si, capturing the unique physiological, biochemical, and computational mechanisms underlying pain in different entities such as humans, octopi, and AI systems. This approach highlights the importance of causal relations in defining mental states and preserves their functional roles across diverse contexts. Furthermore, the paper incorporates elements of token functionalism by recognizing species-specific realizations of mental states. By acknowledging the unique representations of mental states within different species and systems, the framework provides a nuanced understanding of how similar functional roles can be fulfilled by diverse physical substrates. This synthesis of type and token functionalism enhances our explanatory power and coherence in addressing the complex nature of mental states. The resulting framework offers a robust tool for analyzing and understanding mental phenomena, with significant implications for cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence. By maintaining the functional roles of mental states while accommodating their multiple realizations, this approach not only advances theoretical understanding but also opens new avenues for practical applications in cross-species empathy, AI ethics, and the development of context-aware cognitive models.
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701784.432348
In his The Road to Reality as well as in his Fashion, Faith and Fantasy, Roger Penrose criticises string theory and its practitioners from a variety of angles ranging from conceptual, technical, and methodological objections to sociological observations about the string theoretic scientific community. In this article, we assess Penrose’s conceptual/technical objections to string theory, focussing in particular upon those which invoke the notion of ‘functional freedom’. In general, we do not find these arguments to be successful.